


Citrus Starfish Poltergeist

by elo_elo



Category: Far Cry 5
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, But also sort of capable of tenderness?, But not with John lol, Canon-Typical Violence, Dark, Developing Friendships, Dubious Consent, Enemies to Lovers, F/M, John Seed Needs a Hug, John Seed is (probably) a sadist, John Seed is a shit, John Seed is fucked up, Mental Health Issues, OC needs a hug more, OC takes on the role of the deputy, Past Abuse, Possessive Behavior, Pre-Far Cry 5, Psychological Torture, Rough Sex, Slow Burn, Sort Of, Torture, Unhealthy Relationships, Violent Sex, extremely fucked up love, fucked with the canon a little but kept the characters setting and vibe true to source material, i am truly awful at tagging, lore from Far Cry Absolution, lore from Inside Eden's Gate, really really dark
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-22
Updated: 2020-11-30
Packaged: 2021-02-17 23:21:19
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 30
Words: 70,647
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21518116
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elo_elo/pseuds/elo_elo
Summary: Burnt out reporter Fawn Honeychurch pitches what she thinks will be an easy assignment investigating a religious group out in rural Montana. But Hope County isn’t what she expected and soon Fawn finds herself drawn to a very dangerous man.A (slight) au taking place in the months leading up to the events of Far Cry 5 and beyond.
Relationships: Female Deputy | Judge/John Seed, John Seed/Original Female Character(s)
Comments: 136
Kudos: 276





	1. May 13th, 2019

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi guys! This is my first foray into the Far Cry fandom. Super intimidating to be joining a fandom with as many good writers as this one, but I'm hoping you guys like what I have for y'all.

She clocks the sheriff as an old-timer as soon as he walks in. And not just because the man looks like he’s pushing upper fifties. That swagger is hard to fake. One hand resting beside his heavy belt buckle as he comes through the door to the front of the station, the other on the brim of his cowboy hat. An honest to god, no irony cowboy hat.

He takes the id from her outstretched hand. She shores herself up. The sheriff glances up at her, glasses on the tip of his nose. He pushes them back up the bridge of it. He has the worn hands of a man who’s worked all his life. “This your real name?”

No one’s ever accused her of spooking easy, but she’s way, _way_ out of her element. She tries on her warmest smile. Hopes it makes her look just the right amount of naïve. She wishes they were in his office, she could figure him out a little better in his own space. Might tell her which angle to try and work. For now, the smile is her only weapon. “Yessir.” She brushes some of her hair behind her ears. 

It works. A little. He softens his shoulders and leans down on the desk to take another look at her id. “Honeychurch, huh? Last name like that, your parents woulda been doing you a kindness to name you Sarah or the like.”

She thinks that’s big talk from a man named Whitehorse, but she just keeps smiling and says, “maybe so, sir.

The sheriff shrugs, handing her id back to her. She takes it and shoves it into her pocket like she can hide it. Like she can take it back. “Alright then, _Fawn._ What newspaper did you say you were working for?”

“Missoula Daily Sun.”

He frowns. “With a New York driver’s license?”

“Got my degree upstate,” she replies without missing a beat.

He raises an eyebrow. “Couldn’t find a nicer place to muckrake than Montana?”

“Is there a nicer place than Montana?”

That earns her a smile. Whitehorse sighs and lowers his voice and Fawn can tell, without knowing a single other thing about him, that’s she’s about to get a talking to. “What’s a kid like you doing poking around Hope County?” She opens her mouth to respond, but he holds up a hand to stop her. “Forget it, I got an inkling. Now I don’t know what they teach you in _Upstate New York_ , but we here in these parts know that there ain’t no messing around with that goddamn cult. You won’t get my sanction to kick that hornet’s nest.”

Fawn brushes him off, still smiling. “I’d be happy to turn over anything I find. I understand why law enforcement is reluctant to talk about sensitive matters like this, but I’d just like a quick interview with you.” Fawn glances over at the woman typing away at her desk. She’s got white hair piled up on her head, so stiff with hairspray it looks a little like cotton candy, acrylics so long Fawn can’t figure out how the fuck they aren’t breaking on that keyboard. Fawn can almost smell the gum she’s chewing and when she sees that Fawn is looking, she scowls at her. Fawn turns her attention back to Whitehorse. “And maybe some of your staff."

He frowns again, adjusting his hat, and glances off into distant nothing. “Let me sleep on it. Come back in a few days.”

“You going undercover then?”

Fawn snorts. “Hardly.” She unwraps the muffin she picked up inside the gas station and starts to pick at it. It’s dry, the blueberry pieces have an artificial tang. But it's food and she's starving. Hasn't had a bite to eat since leaving Bozeman in the earliest hours of the morning. There’s only one spot in the gas station’s narrow parking lot where she gets service, but even idling there back by the dumpsters, it still sounds like she’s calling Adam from the bottom of the ocean. “Just figured folks around here might be more receptive if I didn’t tell them I work for the Times.”

“And if they google your name?” 

“With what internet? It’s dial-up out here, man.” Fawn rolls the station wagon’s window down. She bought it used down in Bozeman a week ago. Two grand. The guy met her at a Wal-Mart parking lot, wanted his money in cash. The other three windows don’t roll down and it takes two tries _at least_ to get the damn engine to start, but it handles the dirt roads out here like it was born for them. Fawn dangles her hand out the window. Everywhere else in the country, it’s practically summer. It had been so unbearably hot in her New York apartment when she left that she’d left a silhouette of sweat on her floor where she’d been laying, like the outline of a corpse. But she’s far up north now, way way up high, and the weather seems to be playing by its own rules. The day was warm, the sun blanketing the Valley in gold, but now that the sun has started to slip behind the mountains, a chill swells in the air. Fawn shrugs on her jacket.

She hears Adam sigh. “You know Fawn, when the powers that be told you to take it easy, I’m not sure this is what they meant."

“Why not? It’s pretty out here. Fresh air. Clean water. I’m basically camping.”

“You’re doing a story.”

“On a little religious group. It’s practically a puff piece.” She takes her feet off the dash and fumbles for her seatbelt. The empty highway has started to spook her. She isn't sure she's seen a single car drive by since she pulled in for gas thirty minutes ago. “And you know I’ll go crazy if I don’t have something to work on.”

“Can’t have that.” She can almost hear him rolling his eyes.

“I think I’m gonna frame it like _religious experimentation flourishing in flyover country_ or, I don’t know...something like that.”

“How about _Jonestown 2.0: The Wayward Reporter Story_?”

“Oh fuck off.” Fawn laughs, rolling the window up. “I don’t even think they’re a doomsday cult.”

“Oh, just a regular cult then. Very comforting.”

Fawn rakes her fingers through her hair. “What even is a _cult_ huh? You know, Christianity started out as a cult.”

Adam chuckles. “That is so canned. You literally sound so lame.”

Fawn smiles to herself. “Oh, whatever. Just call me every so often, yeah? Make sure I haven’t been eaten by bears out here.” She hears him sigh. “Oh and, uh, I might need you to run a couple leads for me later on. I wasn’t kidding about dial-up.”

“Ah ha. She reveals herself.”

“Come on. Boss has got you covering the Borough city council races. You’re in hell. I know you’ve got nothing but time.” He snorts. “Speaking of hell.” She reaches over for the folder she’s got sitting on the passenger seat, holds her phone between her cheek and shoulder as she flips through it. It’s narrow for now, just a few pamphlets she’d managed to scrounge up in Bozeman, a map of the state torn from the atlas in the motel, a few pages of her own notes. She finds what she’s looking for and tosses the folder back where she'd grabbed it. The paper’s just a list. Places, people. Words, mostly. Ones she keeps coming across. _Bliss. The voice._ They make the small hairs of her arms stand up, but she sloughs off the feeling. “This group actually started in Atlanta. You know anybody?”

Adam makes a thoughtful sound. “Yeah, actually. Used to get drinks with a correspondent at the CBS affiliate down there. I can shoot you her number.”

“That’d be great thanks.”

“You know, Atlanta’s real nice this time of year. Why don’t you head down there instead? Food scene’s out of this world, Fawnie really. Music scene too. You could take, like, you know, a real break.”

Fawn looks out across her dash. A few tall trees sway in the wind, sprays of tiny, pale flowers poke out from their verdant leaves. The mountains loom beyond. Anywhere she looks, there they are. In all directions. Enormous. Unfathomable. It’s quiet out here. Deathly quiet. Fawn shivers, sits up a little straighter. “I’m trying to get back to my roots.”

“You’re from LA.”

“Yeah, well.” Fawn leans forward and tries to the ignition. It sputters. “Listen, I gotta go, Adam. Take care of yourself.”

“Hell, you’re the one who-“ She ends the call.

Fawn supposes that, all things considered, the place she’s renting could be a lot worse. Not a lot on offer as far as furnished apartments go out in bumfuck nowhere. The landlord hadn’t even offered any pictures when she’d called about the newspaper ad. Had mentioned, ominously, that the place had indoor plumbing. As if that was some kind of perk.

But it really isn’t all that bad. A house that’s more like a trailer, just a few rooms in a long lime, situated just outside a tiny nothing of a town called Fall’s End that has, as far as Fawn can tell, a single place to eat and no stoplights. But it’s cozy enough. Has a mattress that isn’t half bad by the looks of it. A real tub. And it does, indeed, have indoor plumbing. It smells a little like floor cleaner, a little like cedar, and as Fawn shuts the door behind her, she relishes the fact that it smells like no place she’s ever lived before. That it conjures up no memories at all.

Furnished isn’t really the right word for the place, really. More like abandoned. Like the previous tenants just got up and left. A real ghost ship. Fawn found a half-drunk gallon of milk in the fridge on her first walkthrough that morning, a pile of unopened mail on the kitchen table. She’d made a note to ask the landlord about it, but now, the urge to intrude is overwhelming. She runs a finger along the edge of one of the envelopes. Fawn hesitates. It’s shitty to rifle through somebody’s mail. It’s also fucking illegal. But the whole Valley has a sort of quiet emptiness that makes Fawn feel like nothing that happens here will ever reverberate anywhere else. Ominously, like nothing here will ever leave. It’s a weird thought and she shakes her head to try and dislodge it.

She picks up a couple envelopes, examines them. They’re all addressed to a Holly Pepper. Fawn can’t help but snort at the name, figures she really doesn’t have the right to though. But if Fawn Honeychurch sounds porny, Holly Pepper sounds like the pen name for a series of bland children’s books. Fawn glances around the little house. Despite being full of this woman's shit, nothing inside gives her any idea of what kind of person Holly Pepper might have been. Other than someone who drinks her milk full fat, of course. Which, wow, what a freak, right? She keeps rifling through, expecting, _hoping,_ to find something interesting, but it's mostly junk, a couple bills. She stops her searching, though, when she finds a flier for Eden’s Gate, neatly folded. It had been hell to find more information on them after that single article she'd stumbled across. Every search she tried came up with results for Heaven's Gate. Pictures of smiling, shaven, doomed cultists. A blinking website from the late nineties. Eden Gate's own website had been polished, but bare bones. No information, just a solitary phone number that Fawn didn't dare call without at least a couple months of background digging. The flier has a similar feeling. The paper is thick, feels expensive. Whiter than any paper that’s been sitting in a mailbox has the right to be. And that symbol again. Hard to miss in its prominent position at the top of the page. She’d sketched it a hundred times on the plane from New York to Denver. Tried to break it apart into pieces she might recognize. Nothing. It’s as nonsensical now as it had been the very first day she found the group on the internet.

The flier doesn’t have much as far as information goes. An address that she makes a note to case tomorrow morning and then the words, written in flowing script, ‘join us in the bliss’. Fawn wrinkles her nose at it. She tacks it to the fridge with a magnet from someplace called the Fang Center and takes a couple steps back. Fawn doesn’t want to look at it anymore. What had seemed so benign in the safety of her New York apartment feels real and sharp and frightening here in the empty darkness all around her. And Christ is it dark. Just a wall of black outside her window. Fawn can barely stand it. She switches on the tv, old enough that it has bunny ears, desperate for some company. It’s playing infomercials even though it’s barely ten pm. It makes her feel lonelier than she's ever felt, suddenly desperate for the sounds of traffic out her window, her neighbors banging around across the thin wall between them. Fawn doesn't even know how far her closest neighbor is out here. She peeks out the front window, checking the make sure her car is still where she parked it. The wind whistles through the trees and beyond it, she hears an animal crying out. Closer, the sound of twigs breaking underfoot. Fawn checks the lock on the door. It seems so flimsy. She presses her whole body against it, closes her eyes, and listens to the wind as it howls.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading <3.


	2. May 15th, 2019

The place purports to have groceries. The sign does at least, but now that Fawn’s pulled into the narrow parking lot, she can see it’s probably as old as the building. And both of them have seen better days. The pumps out front look a little newer, at least, and Fawn makes a mental list of all the shit she should probably stock her fridge with. Fawn glances again up at the building. The sign for _beer, bait, and tackle_ is bigger than the one for groceries. She tries not to get her hopes up.

The station wagon’s door creaks when Fawn opens it. She cracks open a can of coke and her shoes kick up a little dirt when she steps out onto the parking lot. The asphalt is cracked and uneven, like a volcanic fissure.

Fawn finishes the coke in two long pulls, raising the can in a silent cheers when it's empty. A gift from Holly Pepper. She’d found three cases of diet coke under the kitchen sink that morning. They’ve all been flat so far, but Fawn doesn’t really give a shit. She hasn’t had soda since high school, can’t remember ever really liking it, but right now she just needs to stay the fuck awake.

She’s spent the last two nights waking at every quiet noise, every twig breaking beyond her window. She woke once, the earliest twilight light filtering through her curtains, and found the room consumed by silence. Like the whole Valley was holding its breath and an almost childlike terror had opened up inside of her. And then the crickets started again, an early morning bird crying out lonely in the darkness. She had to check the locks three times before she managed to crawl back into bed that night.

So, yeah, this morning Fawn is feeling like a fucking disaster. She checks her reflection in the car window and sighs, massaging her jaw with her fingers. She turned 25 last June. A few people at work had made a big to-do about it. A loud, blurry affair at a sushi place that Fawn can only remember by the pictures. She’d posted only one on Instagram. Artfully out of focus, enough people on either side of her to look crowded. The bobbing flames of birthday candles lighting up a smile that looks like it belongs to someone else. Fawn turned 25 last June, but when she looks at herself again in the reflection of her car window, she looks like a sullen teenager. _Stop it,_ she tells herself, kneading at her temples, _pull yourself together._

She stretches out, rolling her shoulders, trying to soothe the tension that’s been lodged inside of her for, Christ, maybe forever. There’s something about the quiet here, the vast empty space, that has made her more aware of it. Of the way her body has bent itself into so many strange shapes, taken her down so many paths. New York was always noise. LA too, before that. Even when she was young. Headphones smashed against her ears, fingers tap, tap, tapping in time. Desperate for noise. Hope County feels like a vacuum. Harder to hide in a place like this. She kneads her temples harder. It’s got to be lack of sleep that’s sending her down these strange, meandering trains of thought. She pulls her hair back into a haphazard bun and takes a long, deep breath. The air really is cleaner out here. Sharper.

The grocery store/gas station/whatever sits at a wide crossroads, million-dollar views in all directions. The mountains just as imposing and breathtaking as the first time she’d rolled into the Valley. It’s a beautiful day too. Hardly a cloud in the sky, but the light is still soft and filtered, the sun gentle on her skin. Fawn closes her eyes and lets it warm her. God, the air really is nice. The ding of the store’s door pulls her hard out of her thoughts. A woman heads out across the ruined asphalt. Her dark hair falls limp around her shoulders, face strangely blank. She’s wearing a dark denim shirt but the sleeves have been torn off, the buttons on the bottom a little askew. The sun’s out, but there’s still a chill in the air, and the sight of her bare arms makes Fawn shiver. Her eyes look unfocused, but her steps are determined. Fawn watches as she piles back into a run-down truck on the other side of the pumps and drives off.

The bell’s louder up close and Fawn flinches when she heads into the store. The fluorescent lights beat harshly down on her, but in one corner of the place, all the lights are out, an eerie little spot of darkness over by the potato chips. The linoleum’s chipped like the asphalt outside, rivulets of dried mud streaking across its surface. She figures the slightly off smell inside must be whatever tackle is and tries not to breathe too deeply. The guy behind the counter is flipping through a magazine. He looks up when she comes in, does a double-take, and sits a little higher, straightening the ballcap on his head. This place is far enough from the highway leading to the State Park that Fawn figures they probably don’t get too many tourists, too many new faces. She nods at him, smiling. He returns it with a frown, settling back into his magazine, but Fawn can feel that his eyes are still on her.

There’s a _Trump 2020_ sign and an American flag hanging over the register. The Trump sign’s bigger. She's really, _really_ not in New York anymore. She’d picked up a pair of hiking boots at the Patagonia in the Denver Airport, a caramel-colored fleece pullover that she’s tucked into her high-waisted jeans. The fleece reminds her a little of the ones her last foster dad used to wear when he went to slaughter god knows what kind of animal out in the Angeles National Forest. She hopes that she’s doing an alright job of blending in. Last thing she wants to do is draw attention.

She heads past a display of shiny, neon lures toward the fridges at the back of the store. The bait catches her eye on the way. Plastic containers of tightly-packed orange eggs that shimmer as she passes them, worms writhing together in a ball. Fawn’s fingers twitch. She feels a little feral. Rubs a sore spot at the base of her neck until she doesn’t anymore.

“Groceries my ass,” she mutters, glancing back at the guy behind the counter. He scowls at her from the edge of his magazine. The fridges turned out to be freezers. A wall of tombstone pizzas and hot pockets. Her stomach lurches just looking at them and she remembers, off-hand, that she hasn’t even tested the oven to make sure it still works. The microwave sitting precariously next to the sink back at her place has a cracked door, so that doesn’t seem like a much better bet. She’d had a granola bar for breakfast. The last of the food inside the pantry aside from a bag of flour. Her stomach growls. Fawn spots a little bowl of fruit shoved in the corner next to the ice cream bars and crouches down to get a better look. Cold, recycled air wafts over her as she opens the freezer door. 

She roots through some bruised bananas and a few stems of anemic looking grapes before her fingers find the chilled skin of an orange. She pulls it out, examining the way the freezer has iced it. Fawn picks at the outside, waiting for the familiar citrus scent to wash over her. It never does. She frowns. Her first foster home had a lemon tree out in the backyard. It towered over her then, fanciful in its size. The lemons were so lush that their skin was almost perfectly smooth, a Crayola yellow hanging heavily from the tree. She would wake up every morning in the cramped little room she shared with two other kids to the bright scent of them wafting through her window. They were never allowed to eat them, the kids. Her foster mother backhanded her once when she’d slipped up the tree to try and just hold one in her hand. Her ears rang for hours. Fawn puts the orange back into the freezer, wrinkling her nose. She hasn’t thought about that place in, Christ, at least a decade. And she doesn’t want to think about it now. She slams the freezer door shut hard, startling the guy behind the counter. Fawn rakes her fingers through her hair then turns on her heel, breath caught rattling somewhere lost in her chest. She grabs two packets of snack cakes and a case of beer and starts toward the register.

She’s hefting the beer into her backseat when she hears a woman clear her throat behind her. Fawn looks slowly up over the car door, her sunglasses obscuring her eyes. “Now I know it’s not any of my business, but I hate to see a woman go without a decent meal.” She nods at Fawn. “Looks like you’re shopping for a raccoon with all that trash.” Fawn straightens up and shuts her door, taking a minute to size the woman in front of her up. She’s about a head taller; slender in a sort of muscular, substantial way. The v neck t-shirt she’s got on says Whistling Beaver Brewery and it’s low enough that Fawn can see she’s got an incredible rack. Her sandy hair’s pulled up in a bun, a few long pieces sticking out of the sides. Fawn likes the looks of her, makes the split decision that they’re gonna talk. 

She smirks. “ _Can_ I get a decent meal around here?”

The woman rocks back on her heels, clapping her hand over her heart. “Oof. Now you are hurting my pride.” Fawn smiles. The woman extends her hand. “Mary May. I run the bar down the road.”

Fawn takes it. Her skin is warm. “Fawn. I’m…new here.”

Mary May grins “You don’t gotta ever tell anyone that in this town. We know.”

Fawn chuckles. “Noted.”

“Let me get you some grub.” She nods again toward the case of beer. “Some real grub. On the house.”

Mary May’s place is sort of what she’d been imagining when she booked that flight out west all those weeks ago. Bawdy name, couple of surly old men in cowboy boots spitting chew out front, a tattered American flag hanging from one of the eaves. It’s a little dark on the inside, high ceilings crisscrossed with heavy wooden beams. Soft, golden light glittering on the cherry wood bar, pops of neon pooling under their blinking signs. It smells like tobacco and wood polish and cooking meat and Fawn exhales, the tension in her shoulders bleeding out.

Mary May sits her down at the end of the bar with a cup of coffee, telling her she’s going to go scrounge up the cook. Fawn checks the time on her phone. 1:45. They might not even be open yet and Fawn is disarmed by the gratitude that swells in her chest, wonders just how lost and helpless she must have looked out in the parking lot to warrant being scooped up like this. It worries her a little too. She’s usually more on top of things than this, usually has a better sense of her surroundings. She doesn’t normally dive into a story without at least a couple months of solid investigation under her belt. But she doesn't want to think about shit like that. She's already here. Nothing much to do about it now. The sugar packets she spies beside the salt shaker are a little stuck together, but Fawn manages to pry them apart and dumps two into her coffee. She takes a long sip, trying to wash away all the weirdness that’s started bubbling up inside of her.

Fawn figures Casey’s the cook, if the name Mary May is hollering is any indication, but the hulking man who emerges from the basement looks a little too much like Steven Seagal for a spritely, beachy sort of name like that. He nods at her once, shoos Mary May away from him, and disappears back into the little galley kitchen behind the bar. She smells the faint scent of gas then hears the stove come crackling to life. Mary May heads off into a back office and Fawn settles a little in her seat. She runs her thumb along the lip of her coffee mug, worrying the chipped end with her nails.

It’s not just lack of sleep that has her so on edge. She’d managed to head out to the address printed on the flier yesterday afternoon. It had been another gorgeous, cloudless day and as Fawn rumbled down the road, radio cranked way up, she’d felt a little bit like reporter she knows she is. Competent and hardboiled. Unshakeable. The feeling quickly dissipated.

She’d showed up a half an hour before the advertised services were supposed to start, idled on the other side of the road from the solitary meadow church. She’d watched as the tall American flag whipped in the wind, as the sun cast long shadows on the church’s white clapboard exterior. It looked, to her, every bit like the average rural church. Norman Rockwell-y. _And yet._ She’d taken out her notepad but had written nothing down, just tapped her pen restlessly on the blank paper. The dread rising steadily up inside of her wasn’t something she could jot down, wasn’t even something she could really put her finger on. She’d watched as car after car pulled into the field, watched as they greeted each other and filed inside. Fawn hadn’t waited for the service to end. Fear ambushed her. She’d fled.

Mary May slams a plate down in front of Fawn and she nearly jumps out of her skin. Fawn glances around. The feeling the church gave her had come crashing over her so quickly, but here, firmly back in the bar, she lets her shoulders relax again. Mary May points at the plate. “Best burger in Montana.”

Fawn raises an eyebrow. “Montana’s a big place.”

Mary May winks. “Sure is.”

The burger is fucked up good, cooked to absolute goddamn perfection on a bun so soft it has to be homemade. It goes down easy with the pale, cold beer Mary May poured her. She’s easy to talk to. Not in a ‘this is going to be a good source’ way, but in a real, ‘maybe we could be friends’ kind of way. Fawn’s forgotten a little bit what that feels like, asking people about themselves with no real destination in sight. Just making conversation. And Mary May seems to want to, seems to want to get something off her chest. 

She was born and bred in Holland Valley from what Fawn can tell, grew up racing around the tables in this very bar. Her dad used to own it. Mary May’s face draws up when she says “used to” and Fawn figures it’s a relatively recent wound and doesn’t press. And maybe it’s the beer or the warm interior of the bar, but Fawn is a little more open than she probably should be. Tells Mary May she’s from LA, tells her a little bit too about her job. Careful to stay vague. To keep time and place and people fuzzy. But Mary May is a good listener and she slips easily into the comfortable warmth of their conversation,

And then, when it seems like their conversation’s winding down, Mary May leans heavy onto the bar and sighs. A few people have started to meander inside, Fawn figures it’s almost dinnertime but she doesn’t check her phone. Doesn’t really need to out here. “Hell, I’m just glad that you’re not with the cult. Most new people who come into town are here for them.”

Fawn perks up immediately. The gears in her brain start turning “Yeah, no, not for me.” She pops another fry in her mouth. “What’s the deal with that anyway?”

Mary Mae frowns. “You don’t know?” Fawn shrugs. “Oh hell. I’m not in the mood tonight, but here,” she takes a napkin and fishes a pen out of her jean pocket. “This is my number. You give me a call, huh? We can do this again.”

Fawn smiles. “Definitely.”

Mary May reaches out to hand Fawn the napkin but then pulls back, frowning again. “You said you were a reporter, right?”

Fawn shifts in her shift. “Uh, yeah.”

“Are you here about the cult?” Fawn freezes, swallows hard. She’s better than this, has more finesse than this. And yet, here in this bar, Mary May staring her down hard, Fawn can only shrug. She frowns. “I like you, alright. So be careful. Be very fucking careful with that cult.”

It’s evening when Fawn finally heads home. Long light spills onto the road, whispy clouds lit golden by the setting sun chase each other along the mountaintops. She’s chilled out some, feels a little bit like herself again with some food in her stomach, with some normal conversation under her belt. And it feels comforting to have a phone number in her contacts that she can actually use out here. Even Mary May’s warning hadn’t really stuck. She figures small town people are suspicious. Nosy. It’s probably the only thing to do up here, really. Gossip. But when a billboard comes into view as she crests over a hill, that familiar dread crashes over her like a wave. She slows some, then pulls over, idling on the dirt shoulder of the road just to get a better look. She started seeing them on the drive up, the first a couple hours south of Hope County. Big, vague advertisements for Eden’s Gate. Christ, it’s staggering to think about all the money they must have poured into them. And for who to see? For what reason? The ones outside the county had an almost benign feeling. Nothing like what’s looming before her now. She’d noticed, in her scant cursory research, that John Seed seems to be the face of the group even if he isn’t the prophet. Now she can see why. His face looms from the billboard. He has a sort of polished handsomeness that draws her in, even rendered in strange, shadowy black and white. But even as it pulls her in, she can’t deny there’s something sinister about all of it. He’s like an orthodox icon writ country western. Two fingers posed benevolently like an old saint, leathered coat like he pulled it off a rancher. But he doesn’t look like a cowboy or a saint. She can see an earring in the lobe of his right ear. His dark hair is slicked back, his beard neatly trimmed. His shirt has a few buttons open too, like some kind of Italian playboy. Showing off the hard muscles of his chest and something else. She squints. It’s a scar. A brutal scar. Deep. From what she can see, it cuts clean across his chest. _Odd._ Why would they include that on the billboard? It’s a drawing, not a picture. The could have just omitted it. She frowns, fumbling for her notepad in the car's center console. It must have some kind of symbolic purpose. She kills her engine once she finds her pad and sits up a little higher in her seat, trying to get a better sense of what the scar even is, where it might have come from and that’s when she notices that a car has pulled up beside her on the road.

It's a real beater, the engine chugging, the sides a little banged up. The same symbol she’d seen on the flier painted a little haphazardly on the passenger door. Eden’s Gate people. The trucks packed a little too tightly with them. All men. They have the same blank expression as the woman she saw by the pump that morning. Some of them more than others. About half of them have their heads shaved, the others all with hair to their shoulders, a little matted at the ends, thick beards obscuring their mouths. All of them are wearing some sort of off-white fleece. Some look practically new, others are dingy and torn. None of them seem to be talking to each other.

She waves at them, cocking her head to get a better look, to give them a better look at her. They don’t return her wave, just watch her. It seems clear they’re not going anywhere and when she takes another look up at the truck, she can see that there are others, crouching in the bed of the truck. One of them has a gun strapped to his back. It takes a minute for her body to click back with her brain and then her heart starts pounding so loudly that she can barely think straight. It takes her two tries to turn the key, two tries for the engine to sputter to life. And then, like that’s what they’d been waiting for, they pull away, driving fast down toward the state park, swerving a little on the shoulder. The highway looks empty now, barren. Fawn glances on either side of it. To her left, pine forest stretches out dark and infinite. To her right, an open field of tall grass. Her hands tremble a little as she puts the car in drive.

Adam’s being a good sport. As usual. She barely asks him how he is before launching into a long summary of her last few days. Desperate to just get it on the record, desperate to have a pair of outside eyes on it. She’s never felt quite so sunk into a place before. But she’s never done a story like this, is realizing that now with a terrible finality. But she doesn’t want to spook Adam, mostly because if he spooks, she’ll lose it too, so she keeps the conversation light. Tells him about the bubblegum receptionist at the police station, about the smutty neon sign outside the Spread Eagle. Adam laughs at all the right times, but he’s sounding tired too. “What is with these names? Whitehorse? Mary May? The _Seeds_?”

“Ha, yeah, I guess.” It’s dark now. That incredible black darkness. Fawn cracks open another one of Holly Pepper’s cokes and taps her nails on the table. “I, um, saw some of the cult members today, actually.”

“Oh yeah, and how do the circus freaks look?”

Fawn lowers her voice to a whisper. “Adam. They had guns.”

She expects him to fall silent, maybe even to gasp, but instead he just laughs. “You’re in Montana. Of course, they have guns.”

Fawn exhales, then laughs. Oh fuck, of course. She's in second amendment country now. How could she forget that? Relief rushes through her. She rubs at her eyes. “Fuck, Adam this place is getting to me.”

“It’s been like what, two days?”

“I know.” Fawn pulls herself cross-legged onto the narrow chair. She’s in just her underwear and a big Lakers shirt. Stolen from an old boyfriend. She runs her fingers along the goosebumps dotting her bare skin. “It’s just…dark out here. And quiet. I don’t know, I keep getting spooked like a little kid.”

Adam laughs. “Well, pull it together, huh?”

“Yeah, no kidding.” Fawn reaches out for the folder she left on Holly’s pile of junk mail and searches for her list. “Speaking of which,” she goes down the list until she finds John Seed’s name, taps it with her pen. “I need a favor.” 

Adam groans “You gonna pay me for all this extra work?”

“I’ll credit you in the article.” 

He scoffs. “Oh, I see how it is. You break one major story and now you think your name is worth something, huh>” Fawn smiles, twirling her pen. He sighs. “Alright fine, What is it?”

“Thank you.” She sing-songs. Fawn rifles through her notes, phone help against her shoulder with her cheek until she finds a scrap of paper she’d scrounged up in the airport lounge on the trip over. “See if you can get me a phone number for, um, Richards, Brooks, and Seed.” She sets it down, takes the phone back in her hand. “It’s a law firm. Based in Atlanta, does a lot of work in Athens. Or _did._ I have no idea if it’s even in business anymore.” She’d stumbled upon the name of the firm after some cursory googling during her layover in Denver, but hadn’t thought to take the number down. She glances again at her useless laptop. She really needs to get the fucking internet situation handled. ASAP. Especially with her phone dropping service with an almost sadistic gusto. Nothing in the browser ever loads all the way, even when she’s got a bar or two.

“Yeah, yeah sure thing.”

She wakes gasping in the early morning hours, rising from a sleep that barely skimmed the surface. The crickets have slowed, their cacophony replaced by the soft calls of morning birds. Fawn’s heart is ricocheting around her chest. She runs her hand along her forehead. Her hands are freezing, her forehead like a furnace. _We love you,_ are the words forming on her lips, _w_ _e will take you._ When she closes her eyes all she can see is John Seed’s face, cast in chiaroscuro.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading <3


	3. May 24th, 2019

In the car the nights are expansive. They stretch on and on. A shallow infinity that sometimes Fawn feels like she could reach out and touch, take the darkness in her fist. On the road, the darkness has nuance. The soft, layered blues of a night untouched by other light. Tonight, the moon is a soft yellow yolk, following them as they cruise along the empty highway.

Fawn assumes there’s only one radio station in the county, because Mary May never touches the dial, never once switches the station . It’s oldies mostly. Folk, some country. They keep it low so they can talk, but when the conversation lulls, it’s a comforting hum, filling the space between them.. The darkness parts around the truck. Fawn leans her head out of the truck’s open window, lets the cool, clean air rush over her, and glances up at the stars. There’s so many of them out there. Whole galaxies blinking down at them. Mary May glances over, smiles, then she turns the radio up, just a little.

They started doing this that very first night after the met. Mary May offered to show her around a little. The important places. Police station, _real_ grocery store, a couple spots where she could get a decent meal. But the next night, as Fawn finished up her burger, Mary May nodded toward her truck and they piled in again.

At first, Fawn would take mental notes. People, places, events. Things that Mary May would mention offhand. She’d try to figure Mary May out, slot her neatly into an archetype. _Contextualize her._ Figure out a way to fit her into the narrative she’s started to construct of the county, of the cult. And when she’d get home, feeling warm from the inside out, she’d sit down and type up the notes she’d made in her head. She’d feel guilty almost immediately. Like a voyeur. _Like a predator._ So she stopped typing them up, tries now to just let her mind slow on these long drives. Tries to just talk. They don’t really go anywhere. Never end up any place, really, in the county or in their conversations. Mary May seems to just want to drive, to chat. And as much as Fawn tells herself that this is part of her investigations, part of putting the article together, it makes her feel better. Easy like slipping into a warm bath. 

Tonight they’re crawling down the highway, following the river north toward the state park. They’ve been mostly silent for the ride. When Fawn showed up at the Spread Eagle around seven it was packed and an air of weariness had hung so heavy off Mary May when she finally closed up that Fawn could practically feel it in the air. Fawn hadn’t slept well either, figured they made quite the pair as they headed down the road toward her truck. The drive has smoothed out both their kinks. They rumble along.

In the distance, a tall bridge looms. There’s a strange rusted ricketiness to the metal. Like a barge limping along the coast. Fawn imagines that it must groan in the wind. She pulls her legs up cross-legged, holds her shins, straightens her back. She’s feeling more in her own body here than maybe she ever has, wonders if this, exactly this, is why her boss had been so insistent that she take a break from work. She tries not to think of that last conversation in his office. It had felt so dismissive and as she’d walked back to the subway, she’d felt brittle. She’d started to crumble. Fawn leans back against the seat and looks again out the window.

The earth beside the road slopes down into the river, rising sharply on the other side. Pines dot the rocky cliffside and beyond that, even larger mountains loom. The Whitetails, Fawn remembers from the map. The early summer weather has started to stick around even after sunset, the ground warm from where the sun’s baked it, but the peaks in the distance are still capped in snow. “My brother used to go fishing around here.” Fawn glances over at Mary May. She’s got one hand on the wheel, the other holding up her head as she leans toward the driver’s side window.

“I bet the fishing out here is incredible.”

Mary May snorts, looking sidelong at Fawn. “What do you know about fishing?”

Fawn smiles, fidgeting with the laces on her sneakers. “Jack shit.”

“That’s what I thought.”

Fawn frowns, glancing back over at Mary May. She has her foot in the door and every journalistic instinct she has is screaming at her to kick it open. But these rides, the tab that she’s got running now at the Spread Eagle, they all feel like a huge kindness. And Fawn feels too, in the quiet darkness of Mary May’s truck, as ragged as her boss told her she seemed. Feels like a feral stray being coaxed back to civilization. So she compromises, stretches her legs back out, and turns to face Mary May. “Your brother still fish out here?”

Mary May is silent for a beat, her knuckles white on the steering wheel. Then she shrugs. “Not really sure, actually. Not sure if he fishes much anymore.”

Fawn swallows. “Is he…still around?”

Mary May laughs a little breathy. “If you’re asking me if he’s dead, then nah. As far as I know he’s still kicking. Far as if he’s still in the county?” She shrugs. “Assume so.”

Fawn’s still figuring out what to say to that when they crest up onto a bluff and Fawn sees it. A statue, looming from the top of the mountain they’ve been driving at the base of. She jolts, her back slamming against the worn seats of Mary May’s truck. “What the fuck is that?”

Mary May slows, pulling over onto the shoulder. They both jostle in their seats on the rough gravel. “Joseph,” she says, killing the engine. Without the headlights, darkness rises quickly up around them.

Fawn flips around to look back at Mary May. “Joseph? Like…the prophet? From Eden’s Gate?” 

“Yup.”

Fawn looks up out of the window. Lit from below, its surface is an eerie white, shadows dancing at its base. The hair on her arms stands straight up. “Holy fuck. They did not mention that on the internet.”

Mary May laughs. “What did they say on the internet?”

“Not a whole lot.” Fawn’s voice sounds far away. She fidgets. It’s the first time she’s said, out loud, what’s been dawning on her for nearly two weeks. She’d spent months preparing for her last story before she even started doing her key interviews. And that had been in New York when she could run back to her own apartment and hide. Where could she hide here? She reaches for the car door on impulse, then turns back to look at Mary May “Mind if I?”

“Knock yourself out.”

Fawn steps out into the night, hand holding tightly to the truck’s door, like it’s mooring her to the earth. The statue is even more enormous when she’s outside the car, when she can feel the air zinging around her. “How long has it been here?” Her voice is quiet, the vastness of the valley swallowing it up.

“Couple years.”

Fawn looks over her shoulder. “And they can just…build it? This huge fucking…thing?”

Mary May shrugs, but her lips twitch downward. “They own the property.”

“Aren’t there like…” Fawn looks back up at it. From below, Joseph’s face is shrouded in darkness, but she can see the pale glow of his outstretched hand, the other holding his book. So big and wide and heavy looking that Fawn takes a step back toward the truck, aware suddenly of how easily the book could come crashing down on top of her. “Aren’t there like, I don’t know, zoning laws or something?”

Mary May snorts. “Out here? Don’t joke.”

“That is…” Fawn backs up until the backs of her shins hit the side of the truck, “insane.” She slides back into the truck, slamming the door shut. It’s a warm night. Fawn is shivering. “That’s fucking insane.”

“Yeah well, welcome to Peggy country.”

Fawn raises an eyebrow. “Peggy?”

Mary May starts the truck. “Project at Eden’s Gate. Peggy.”

“Huh.” Fawn rakes her fingers through her hair. “They call themselves that too or?”

“Hell no.”

Fawn tries to laugh, but she can’t sit still. Her mind is spinning, completely off the rails. She wants to know what that statue is made of, wants to try to even begin to conceptualize the amount of money it took to erect. She wants to run her hands along it. To make sure it’s real. Fawn exhales roughly, pulling her legs up to her chest. She wants to feel small, like a little rabbit hiding in the brush. Away from the statue’s gaze. Mostly, though, she wants a fucking drink. Mary May must feel the same because she nods to the backseat. “I’ve got some whiskey back there.”

“In the truck?” Mary Mae laughs her yes. “What the hell!? Why?”

Mary May winks at her. “Never know when there’s gonna be an emergency.” Fawn smiles, settling back against the seat. She tucks her hands between her thighs to keep them from shaking. And as Mary May pulls back onto the highway, Fawn looks only ahead. As they take a sharp turn, Mary May clears her throat. “You trying to be heading home now or?”

Fawn glances over. “Nah. Have something in mind?”

“Let me take you somewhere cool.”

The stars blink at them as they lay on the hood of Mary May’s truck. The pointed tops of pines shiver in the breeze. The scent of alder wafts over them, cut with the sharp grunge of a dying campfire off in the forest beyond. Fawn takes a nip from Mary May’s whiskey then passes it back. The hood’s warm on her back from the engine and she takes a deep, long breath.

Mary May brought them to a clearing up on a bluff overlooking Fall’s End. From way up here, the town looks tiny. Just a little blip in the valley, a star in a vast sky. Fawn feels huge up here, and very small. Like a god and like an insect. And she is just letting herself feel all those contradictory ways when Mary May shifts beside her. “You lied to me.”

Fawn turns to look at her. Mary May is staring up at the stars, a soft smile on her face. “What?”

Mary May rolls her head toward Fawn almost lazily. “You didn’t tell me you worked for the New York Times.”

Fawn swallows hard. “I don’t remember telling you where I worked.”

Mary May laughs. “Oh please, you _heavily_ implied that you were a reporter working in Montana.”

“I am working in Montana,” Fawn says, a little weakly. Mary May rolls her eyes. This has never happened before, this moment. Usually, when she reveals herself, she’s got distance between her and her subjects. Usually, she doesn’t give a shit about how the men she’s reporting on feel. “Are you, um, mad?”

Mary May nips at the whiskey. “Nah.”

Fawn exhales, sitting up on the hood to look down at Mary May. “Great, um, but could you do me a solid and-“

“Secret’s safe with me.” She passes the whiskey back.

Fawn takes another nip. “How’d you find out?”

“Google.”

Fawn snorts. “Well, I owe somebody back in New York twenty bucks.” A heavy silence falls between them. “I’m sorry.”

Mary May sits up. “Don’t be. Kinda funny.” She has heavily lidded eyes. They make her look older than Fawn knows she is. They make her look hard. The rest of her hides them. That bouncy blonde hair, the gloss she spreads over her full lips. But here in the half dark, all Fawn can really see are her eyes.

She passes the bottle back and looks back out at Fall’s End. There are lights glittering far out in the distance, further afield than she’s been yet. And she thinks about all the people she saw filing into that lonely church, thinks of John Seed. She doesn’t want to, shakes the feeling physically off her. “Do you google everyone you meet?”

“Pretty much.”

“How suspicious of you,” Fawn teases.

“Have to be. Since the cult moved in.” All the air rushes out of their conversation.

Fawn watches her from the corner of her eye, bottle suspended just close to her lips. The crickets are suddenly very loud. “Has it been that bad?”

Mary May blinks up at the stars, she flexes her fingers over a spot on her ribs, lays them gingerly on it. “Honestly, yeah. It really has.” Fawn gulps, hands tight around the whiskey bottle. Mary May sits all the way up, shaking herself off like a dog in the rain. “Fuck, I don’t want to talk about the goddamn cult. I wanna talk about something else.”

Fawn settles back against the windshield, passing the bottle over, relieved at the change in tone. “What do you want to talk about?”

Mary May smiles to herself. “I wanna talk about you? I wanna talk about your big, bad men.”

Fawn laughs. “My what?”

“Epstein. Prince Andrew. Nasty sons of bitches you write about.” Fawn chuckles, then checks reflexively over her shoulder. The darkness is so complete beyond the treeline that Fawn can’t look at it for long. “I read an article of yours before I met you actually. The one about the Epstein case. Before he…you know.” She drags her finger across her throat.

Fawn shivers. “People out here read the Times?”

Mary May swats at her. “Nope, just Fox News and the Bible.” Fawn smiles, shaking her head. Mary May takes a long pull from the bottle and passes it back. “Was it scary?” Her voice echoes and Fawn pauses, the bottle at her lips.

She sets it down on the hood. “Was what scary?”

“Reporting on guys like that? On shit like that?”

Fawn chews at the inside of her cheek and takes a long pull of the whiskey. She’s brittle again, like she’d been on the subway. She’d gone home that day and retched into her sink, bile and nothing else. She’d turned her phone off. She’d laid on the floor. The air smells like pine and charcoal. She passes the bottle back. “Sometimes, yeah.”

The sun is almost rising when she gets home. That cool color just before twilight. But sleep isn’t coming tonight. Old memories have settled hard inside of her, new fears too. Work fills the space where they linger. So she makes herself a cup of coffee from the instant granules she’d found in the pantry and boots up her computer, plugs her phone into the usb port. Still no internet, but Adam managed to get through to her phone long enough to send her the dossier she asked for. She drums her fingers on the table while she watches it load. When the pdf finally opens, her heartbeat finally slows. Back to work.

John Seed is 32 years old. Born in Rome, Georgia on October 25th, 1986. The third brother, the youngest brother. Fawn read something once about sibling psychology. She can’t remember it. Her heart’s pounding. She takes another sip of coffee.

There’s no information in the dossier about his birth parents and she makes a note to find out more, because whoever they were, they didn’t stick around. He was legally adopted by Rosemary and Harold Duncan in 1992. Fawn makes a note to untangle the name changes. What would it mean if he never took his new parent’s last name? What would it mean if he did, then changed it back? There’s no other mention of the other two brothers and Fawn wonders what happened to them between then and now, wonders what would have to happen to a person to make them erect a statue of themselves on a mountain top. Fawn takes out her list and stars Joseph’s name. He should be next on her list. She has almost nothing on him outside of what she could find in Eden’s Gate pamphlets. She’d gotten some information on the eldest, Jacob, before leaving New York. Pulled a few strings to get his discharge papers, but hadn’t found anything remarkable. She’s left it in the back of her folder, waiting until she gets reliable internet to try and track down some of the names mentioned in it.

Fawn takes another sip of coffee and scrolls down in the dossier. John graduated from Texas A&M in 2008 with honors, Harvard Law in 2011. Opened up his own practice almost immediately after. Bankrolled by who? Fawn makes a note to look into the Duncans, see about their finances, underlines the number for the Atlanta affiliate Adam gave her in her notes. Fawn keeps scrolling.

The dossier’s lengthy but messy. It jumps back and forth along a ragged timeline. Fawn scrolls past an article from 1997 about a young John Duncan winning the Holy Innocents Christian Academy spelling bee and then an Atlanta gossip column from 2012 about a John Seed breaking off a messy engagement with the daughter of an old-money southern family. But even if the dossier is chaotic, it’s thorough and that makes the big gaps in time all the more obvious. Months in 2013 and 2014 unaccounted for, nearly the entirety of 2016 off the grid. She scrawls a note to figure out where Jacob and Joseph were then, to try and triangulate their timelines.

Fawn has found her rhythm by the time the sun rises. Scrolling, taking down notes, scrolling, taking down notes. The photo nearly makes her jump out of her seat. She spills some of her coffee on her notes, hand clutched to her chest. Fawn breathes hard through her nose. “Pull yourself together,” she hisses. There’s no reason she should be acting like this. Any dossier worth its salt should have photos and it’s not even the first one of him she’s seen. But this one is decidedly different than the serene, posed pictures she’d seen of him with his law associates. This one is candid. He's sitting outside, the sun at his back. Behind him sits a wide, gnarled tree, Spanish moss hanging from the boughs. He’s just noticed the camera, lips curling into a slight smile, eyes a little playful, a little soft. It looks like summer and she can see the slightest sheen of sweat on his forehead. The picture is just from the chest up, but Fawn can tell that he’s sitting, something in his stance relaxed and easy. He’s wearing a button-down, the top four undone, just the barest hint of that scar at the bottom of the photo. She wants to know who took it, wants to know why it’s even in the dossier. But she shakes those thoughts off. They aren’t relevant. She doesn’t want to look at the photo anymore.

Fawn scrolls down, but finds herself quickly scrolling back up. Over and over she returns to the photo. He looks so much younger than the man she’s seen on the billboards even though the date on the photo tells her it's barely a year old. He looks bright. Like someone she might trust. Someone she might see at the end of a bar and try to catch his eye. Someone she might want to be noticed by. A lone truck tumbles down the road outside her house. Her coffee’s gone cold.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading <3


	4. June 1st, 2019

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> John Seed enter stage left.

“Used to have a few friends who lived out there, on those farms, but the Seeds own them now.”

Fawn looks up from her notepad. “All of them?” Fawn can’t remember what she asked Skylar, can’t even remember how their conversation even took this turn, but it’s ground her thoughts to a halt. She blinks up at her. Skylar’s looking off-center, out at the dusty shrubs dotting the side of the highway. It’s another warm, cloudless day but storm clouds have started to threaten along the far peaks, an electric zing in the air. Fawn clicks her pen against the pad and takes a better look at the woman in front of her. Skylar reminds Fawn a little bit of a yappy dog. Petite, slight, but holding herself in a kind of macho way that belies a wild, impulsive insecurity, stomping around in her waders like she might bite the next person who tries something with her. Fawn tries not to be that person.

They’ve been talking for about fifteen minutes now, the two of them loitering outside the bait shop. The lake stretching out behind it is crystal clear. A smooth glass surface broken only by the occasional intrusion of fish, their mouths gaping, their tails shimmering as they dive back under. The radio said the weather’s going to be in the seventies all week, and it feels nice like that. A dry, gentle heat cooled by the water, warm enough that Fawn’s just got a t-shirt tucked into her jeans, her hair pulled up into a loose bun, her neck a little damp where the sun’s been hitting it.

She came to the bait shop, mostly, to buy a router. The people at the grocery store had been useless when she’d asked around for one and Fawn had pretty much given up hope of ever connecting to the internet again when someone at the Spread Eagle mentioned he’d heard a guy was selling one used. The guy in question, a surly old fisherman with a pronounced limp, wanted thirty bucks for the dusty, ancient-looking thing. Fawn told him that she’d give him twenty and wouldn’t even ask him to wipe the dust off.

Skylar had been kicking around the front of the shop when Fawn left and something in her face made Fawn slow to a stop. She could tell this girl would talk. Sometimes people just have that look. And when she’d glanced over at her from under the brim of her camo ballcap, Fawn knew she’d been easy to keep talking too. _I’m a reporter,_ she’d said, _just trying to get a feel for the area. Do you mind if I ask you a few questions? Just a quick chat. Off the record, of course._ Skylar had eyed her but, with a quick glance in either direction, agreed. It had been a relief. Nobody else but Mary May has really wanted to talk to her, clamming up the moment she even implied she might be a reporter and Fawn needs at least some sense of the county outside the walls of the Spread Eagle. But Fawn has only gotten through a couple pretty standard questions about life in Hope County when Skylar puffs up like an angry bird and starts talking about the cult. And that creeping dread returns full force. Even though this is her story, even though this is the sole reason she’s even out here. Fawn fights the urge to look over her shoulder at the road and taps her pen again on her notepad. “The Seeds own _all_ the farms in the valley?”

“Most of ‘em at least. Fucking John Seed’s doing.”

Fawn tries to ignore the shiver that rolls down her back at the sound of his name. “How’d that happen?”

Skylar shrugs. “No clue. Don’t think that people that used to own them have much of a clue either.”

“Huh.” Fawn chews her bottom lip, her pen scratching against her paper. She makes a note to check it out, wonders if she could convince somebody at the county clerk’s office to let her root around in their records, see if she can track down the deeds of trust for the farms in question. Her mind is spinning and it’s suddenly hard to focus on what the woman in front of her is saying. How would this cult be able to afford to buy up all of this land? And why would they even want to? Fawn clears her throat. “Well, um, thank you, Skylar. For speaking with me.” She holds out her hand. “I’ll be sure to be in touch.”

Skylar takes it limply. “Uh, yeah, sure, whatever.” She scuffs the rubber tip of her wader boot on the damp earth. “Anyway, what did you say this article was about?”

“Water pollution,” Fawn calls over her shoulder, hurrying back to her station wagon. She slides inside, slamming the door, and exhaling loudly. Her eyes flutter closed and she fumbles blindly through her bag for her phone. It’s useless. Not even a single bar of service. Fawn tosses it into the passenger’s seat. The isolation is rankling her.

She jimmies the key in the ignition. The engine sputters and groans, roaring to life this time on the fourth try. It’s taking longer each time. She rests her head on the steering wheel, her hands limp beside her temples. Then she takes a deep breath and sits up. The radio clock blinks 3:30. Thirty minutes until the Spread Eagle opens. Fawn puts the car in gear.

The tattoos surprise her. They weren’t mentioned anywhere in the dossier and nowhere in anything she’s read about him would lead her to believe that he would be as into getting inked as he so obviously is. Because he is _covered_ in them. All up his arms, exposed where he’s rolled up the sleeves of his shirt. His hands too, each finger dense with ink. Fawn reaches instinctually into her bag, searching for her notepad. She sees a jagged knife on one of his forearms, the eye of a peacock feather just above it. They must have some meaning, same as the scar, and she figures that once she gets her internet up and running, she can cross-check the meanings, try to craft a fuller picture of him. And she’s just about to jot that down when she realizes that a hush has fallen over the bar and she understands, with a dawning horror, that this is not the John Seed from her dossier. This is John Seed in the flesh.

Fawn glances around like she’s waking up from a dream, kneading a tense spot at the base of her neck. She has no idea how long he’s been standing there just inside the Spread Eagle’s front door. The fries on her plate have gone cold and even the jukebox is quieter than she remembers it being, the music stuttering. The whole bar is holding its breath, all eyes on John.

Two men lumber in after him, flanking him. Their eyes sharp and narrow, watching everything. Waiting. The energy changes when they walk in. Electricity snapping back in the air. The threat of violence so thick she can almost taste it. Her fingers flex when she notices the pistols tucked in the waistband of each man’s pants. She can feel her heart thumping in her throat. No one has fired a shot, but she can smell the faint sulfur of a gun going off. An old, deeply buried memory. She tries to shake it off, but finds that she can barely move. The air is the bar is thick. Her lungs feel heavy.

John Seed clasps his hands behind his back and smiles. It’s different from the one in the dossier photo. This smile is a threat. He surveys the room and then, apparently satisfied, rocks back on his heels, smiling wider before clicking his tongue against his teeth and heading toward the bar. The room orbits around him. He is the only center of gravity.

Mary May is frozen behind the bar, her hands curled into fits, jaw so tight Fawn can see the tendons in her neck. “Afternoon, Mary May.” His voice is different than Fawn expected. None of the southern twang his birthright undoubtedly bestowed upon him. Instead, he speaks with an even, clipped tone she imagines he must have picked up at Harvard. Mary May looks like she wants to crawl over the bar and throttle him. Fawn can feel the hatred wafting off her and she wants to reach out, to pull her back, but she’s still frozen in place. “I would _love_ a cup of that fantastic coffee you serve here.” That smile again, that bright, menacing mile.

Mary May’s nails dig into the wood of the bar. “You don’t have coffee over there on that big compound of yours?” John looks delighted. Casey emerges from the kitchen, setting a mug of coffee down hard on the counter. He whispers something in Mary May’s ear and she tenses, propelling off the bar and heading over toward the taps. Fawn watches her hunch over the back bar, breathing heavy through her nose.

“Mmmh!” Fawn snaps back up to look at John. He’s taken a sip of the coffee, rocking theatrically back on his heels. “Delicious.” He sets the mug down hard. “Thank you _so_ very much.” Up closer, Fawn can see that his cheeks are a little flushed, like he’s been exerting himself. But he has the calm, coiled stillness of a predator, a swagger that she’s seen on a hundred different lawyers in her time on the legal beat. His dark hair is slicked back, not a single strand out of place. His clothes are equally neat, well-fitted like he’s had them tailored. And while he’s wearing the same cowboy boots she’s seen on most of the men out here, his look brand new. She notices too, a strange feeling settling over her, that he’s fit. The muscles of his chest are hard and defined. His arms strong, jeans skimming the long lines of his legs. She walks her eyes back up his body to find that he is staring at her, the smile on his face faltering, just a little. She stiffens, her fingers curling unconsciously into loose fists. Fear races up her spine. And something else. Something worse. She should look away. She should fucking _leave._ Fawn does neither and for what could be seconds, or for what could be hours, they hold each other’s gaze. His eyes were a deep, oceanic blue in that smiling photo, but here, in the low light of the bar, they look almost grey, like ice cracking over a frozen river. Cold and hard. The sick glee she’d seen in his face before almost gone, replaced instead with malice. His fingers twitch. She wonders what he sees, hopes she doesn’t look as small and timid as she feels. She’s about to say something, about to just bubble over, when John breaks eye contact, pushing off from the bar and turning heel toward the door. He nods at one of his men, motions back toward Fawn with his eyes. And then, just like that, he leaves. She exhales, the world bleeding back into her peripheries. Bright embarrassment rushes up inside of her and she sits up a little higher. She’s not sure what the fuck just happened and Fawn tucks her hair behind her ears, a little miffed now. He’s just some guy. John Seed is just some lawyer from nowhere Georgia. He’s not even close, _not even close,_ to the scariest man she’s gone toe to toe with. Fawn frowns at her fries, pushing the plate a little away from her.

The man John nodded at heads up to the bar to pay for John’s coffee. He leans in and says something quietly to Mary May. She recoils, whole body stiff. “None of your fucking business is what. Now get the fuck out.” The man grins, but does as she says. Fawn watches as he leaves. He’s wearing the same dingy fleece shirt she’d seen on the men in the truck the week before. His hair and beard long and unkempt just like theirs had been. He turns to look at her full-on and Fawn sucks in a ragged breath. He has that symbol, that same fucking symbol, drawn on the middle of his forehead. Drawn or tattooed. Her heart has gone silent in her chest. She flexes her fingers against the bar’s whorled wood. They’re chilled. And then, in an instant, he is gone too. The bar exhales, the low chatter of the other patrons rises again around her.

Fawn lays a twenty down on the bar and swings her bag over her shoulder. She hasn’t finished her beer or her burger, but her stomach feels too numb to eat. Her skin is buzzing. She nods to Casey, about to head out, when Mary May takes her by the arm, speaking in a low, conspiratorial whisper. “Be careful on the way home okay? Check to see if anyone’s following you.”

Fawn looks at her, worrying the inside of her cheek. The sun has just slipped beneath the horizon, the night sky still a pale, even blue, but the rising darkness feels cavernous. “Why would someone be following me?”

“The cult likes to keep track of everybody in the county.” She lowers her voice even more. “He was asking who you were.”

Fawn shifts on her feet. Her hands feel a little numb. “John?” Mary May nods. She glances back toward the bar. Casey’s thrown all his attention into polishing a single glass, but Fawn can tell he’s listening closely. “What was that all about? Why was he even here?”

May May shakes her head, she’s holding herself tightly, lips tight. Fear and rage are roiling over her, a palpable braid. “Our monthly reminder.”

Fawn frowns. “Reminder? Of _what_?”

Mary May swallows hard. “That he’s still here. That they’re all still here.” She lays her palm against her forehead and sighs. “Like I could ever forget.”

Fawn reaches out to touch Mary May on the arm, but she shakes her off. “What’s going on?” 

Mary May rakes her fingers through her hair, the energy around her like a swarm of bees. “Closing up early tonight.” Fawn swallows hard. “Call me when you get home, okay?”

Sleep isn’t coming. Fawn tosses and turns, kicks the covers off, yanks them back up around her shoulders. She’d left the tv running in the living room, desperate for the sound of other people. But when she closes her eyes, the sound fades away. A deep quiet settling over her. When she closes her eyes, she sees John Seed’s hands. Those long fingers. Dexterous. A wide palm that would fit nicely around her neck. Fawn flinches. These thoughts feel outside herself. _Invaders._ They roll over her all the same. She wants to know what the tattoos on his fingers say, wants to taste the words on her tongue. She wants him to shove them down her throat. Toxic. _Toxic._ Fawn kneads her eyes with her fists. It’s the lack of sleep. _Has to be_. But no. Fawn grinds her thighs together. These are old, familiar fantasies. Fucking primordial, locked away. Well-worn grooves of violence. Guilt has always made her wettest and it’s guilt that seizes up in her when she remembers Mary May’s heavy shoulders bent over the bar.

Fawn sighs, shifting on her bed’s stiff sheets. Maybe if she cums, she’ll finally be able to get some sleep. Doesn’t really matter how she gets there, right? She shifts down, wriggling out of her panties. She pauses, then tosses her t-shirt off too, exposing her nipples to the cool night air. She likes to feel bare like this, exposed. Fawn walks her fingers down her body, giving herself time to back out, to change her mind. She remembers the way he looked at her, the way his fingers twitched like he’d wanted to take hold of her. She slips her hand between her legs.

Her body is on fire, ignited again after, god, months without touch. Even her own. She’d been too busy, too fucking stressed. Fawn closes her eyes and rocks against her fingers. Her thoughts slosh around in her head, conjuring strange images, odd sounds. Bruises and shouting and the clean call of birds. She feels feverish, crazy. Her thighs are hot and slick and she slips a third finger inside herself. The bed creaks as she moves, headboard slamming against the plaster wall. Fawn flips over, ass in the air, and fucks herself hard down on her fingers. She remembers what Mary May said. That John Seed had asked about her. All that barely contained violence directed singularly toward her. Terror edges her pleasure. She trembles when she cums, collapsing onto the mattress. The silence is overwhelming. Crushing. Fawn scrambles for her clothes, bright with humiliation.

It rained while she was in bed. She’d heard it beating against her tin roof as she tried to sleep. But now the night is still, cool moisture hanging around her. The air smells clean like wet soil, but every so often the breeze picks up the faint scent of rot

Fawn stares out into the darkness, barefoot on the house’s narrow porch. She takes a long drag of her joint. It looks like shit, sloppy and loose. Her hands shook as she tried to roll it, spilling bud all over Holly Pepper’s dining room table. She’d smuggled the weed in a box of tampons, held her breath through TSA. The first in apparently many foolish decisions since leaving New York. She’s thankful to have it now, though. Thankful for the way it’s chilling her out from her toes to the top of her head. She wants to forget all about John Seed, wants to scurry back to New York with her tail between her legs. But her boss told her to take six months. To take six months and come back. _Refreshed,_ he’d said. And maybe she hadn't quite done that, but she's never started a story she didn't finish. She’s not going to run away from a little southern preacher in a nowhere town.

A truck rumbles down the road, its headlights splashing light onto Fawn’s bare shins before it takes a wide turn down the road. She can’t see the color of it. She doesn’t want to look at it too closely. She stubs the joint out on the porch’s rickety railing and heads back inside. The shadows of the house consume her.

Fawn puts a pot of water on, shakes the rest of the instant coffee granules into the house’s singular mug, and sits down at the kitchen table. The last few hours have started to fade away. She’s feeling a little more like herself, a little less like…whatever that had been. Fawn takes a deep breath and pulls her folder out of her bag. It’s a little thicker now, her notes a little more extensive. She checks the oven clock. Two in the morning. Her mentor the very first year she worked for the Times told her that, if she thought a source might be tricky, she should call late at night, when she’d get the voicemail. That way she could suss out their voices, get a sense of them before they got a sense of her. She fusses with the corded phone, searching for the number for John’s Atlanta law firm. Adam sent it over two days go, still trapped in the hell of the local politics beat, desperate for anything else. Fawn raps her nails on the table as she dials it. It doesn’t ring. The number’s been disconnected. Her pen hovers over her notepad. Another truck rumbles down the road outside her house. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading <3


	5. June 7th, 2019

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I may have taken ~some~ liberties with John's tattoos. Forgive me lol.

She feels him before she sees him. Just the tiniest pinprick on the back of her neck, a little electricity in the air. Like before a storm. The door of the gas station dings and the man behind the counter jolts. Their eyes meet and Fawn watches his Adam’s apple bob, watches the way his fingers tighten around one of the snack cakes he’s ringing up. Fawn grips the edge of the counter and the two of them stay like that, frozen in place, until they hear the glass door click shut, hear the sound of boots striding lazily across the linoleum.

The cashier averts his eyes, shaking his head, jaw tight. He tosses her shit into a plastic bag and shoves it at her, a clear dismissal. But Fawn hesitates. She doesn’t want to turn around, knows _in her bones_ that whatever, _whoever,_ is behind her is not something she wants to see. _And yet._

All the fine hairs on the back of her neck are standing on end. She knows what a predator feels like, spent almost her whole life in California hiding in the underbrush from them. Funny how a few years in New York made her forget that. Funny how a few weeks in Hope County made her remember. Fawn tries to catch the cashier’s eyes, tries to gauge what he’s seeing behind her, but he’s opened up his magazine again, eyes staring unblinkingly down at it.

She takes a long breath and turns. She’s expecting it, prepared for it, and still, the sight of John Seed staring her down from the front door chills her blood. He smiles when their eyes meet. Fawn shakes her head, holding her bag of groceries in a tight fist. She should stop and talk to him, should introduce herself. He is, after all, her scoop. But all she wants to do in that moment is get the fuck out of this gas station and back safely into her car.

She takes the long way around the store, wandering through the narrows aisles, wondering if he’ll try to follow, if he’ll give up the chase. She keeps him steady in her peripheries, but doesn’t look, making a quick beeline for the front door. But before she can slip past him, John takes two slow steps to one side, blocking her exit. Fawn exhales, so close that she’s sure he must be able to feel the heat of her breath on his skin. His button-down is blue silk, just the top two buttons undone today, that scar hidden from view. Fawn swallows hard. He’s almost a head taller than her, but lean. He looks strong, but in a streamlined way. Not like some of the pictures she’s seen of the older Seed brothers. She glances up to look at him and finds his blue eyes churning, paler than in the picture, but not as frightening as they had been at the bar. Still, goosebumps race up her arms. A knot settles in her throat. “I’ve heard…” He pauses, his voice a little honeyed, a little sweeter than it had been to Mary May. John isn’t looking at her, busies himself instead with the magazines on the rack by the door, running his fingers lazily over their spines, “that’s there’s a reporter in Hope County.” He looks over at her now and she hates the way she shrinks from his gaze. He cocks his head, like he’s curious, like he’s taking her apart piece by piece. “Should I assume that’s you?”

Fawn straightens up, coming back to herself all at once. She puffs her chest out. This is _not_ her first rodeo and she has squared off with _much_ scarier men than a little Southern preacher in a gas station. John’s eyes gleam, one side of his mouth twitching upward. Fawn tries on her best, sweetest smile, quirks an eyebrow. “What gave me away?”

He chuckles, his smile widening. His teeth are perfect. A neat row of white porcelain and Fawn doesn’t know why but she finds that terrifying. He leans away from her, hands clasped behind his back. “Everything about you, gave you away.” Fawn’s smile falters. She has no idea what the fuck to say to that and her lips part over the words she can't find. She watches him look, watches as his eyes trace her face, land last on her lips. His fingers twitch. The movement draws her eye. _Avaricia_ on his middle, _luxuria_ on his pointer. She tries to make a mental note to look the Latin up, but her brain is sputtering. _Luxuria_ twitches again. He flexes his fingers, his palm wide. And in the center of it, that fucking symbol. The one she’s seeing all over now, everywhere she looks. The ink is so dark Fawn almost reaches out to touch it, like she can wipe it from his skin. A faded snake curls around his wrist, teeth bared. It’s too much. She pulls her windbreaker closer around her and tries to edge past him again, but he doesn’t budge, side-stepping again to put his whole body in front of the door. Fawn glances back at the cashier, desperate for some backup, but he’s turned his back to them, packing some chew in his bottom lip. John takes a step forward, closing some of the distance between them. He smells like fine leather, the musk of expensive cologne and faintly, distinctly, like gasoline. “What’s your article about?”

“Food deserts.” She spits it at him, shoving hard into him. Their skin touches for just a moment, like a shock. This time, though, John relents, stepping aside to let her out the door. The sunlight is a shock, the clean air painful in her lungs. It takes everything inside of her not to break out into a full, desperate run, her hands trembling as she opens her car door. She slides in and takes a deep breath, switches the radio on. Fawn doesn’t recognize the song, the melody gives her goosebumps.

She reaches up to knead a sore spot at the base of her neck and then she sees it. A thick white book sitting on her passenger seat, that symbol cut dark across its front. Fawn doesn’t need to open it to know what it is. She flips around, checking her backseat and when she finds it empty, she looks instinctively out the car window. John has come outside to watch her go, his arms crossed over his chest. She remembers her fantasy of him, of those fingers wrapped around her neck. How hard she’d cum thinking about it, about him. She jams the key violently into the ignition. She needs to get more fucking sleep. She needs to get her fucking shit together. Fawn doesn’t look back as she throws the car into gear, but she can feel his eyes on her, can feel them like a touch, fingers inching up her spine.

Sleep washes over her like a wave. One moment she’s on her threadbare couch, the evening news droning in the background and the next she’s tossing in a dream. A long, cold beach stretches out all around her. The air smells like salt and fish and her skin feels dried out, like it's been preserved.

She is digging a hole, digging desperately though she isn't sure why. The sand is thick, gluey. It sticks to her fingers, broken shells cut at her skin, bits of seaweed slimy and slick as they wrap around her knuckles. The water is relentless, fighting her as she digs. The tide rolling up to her skinned knees. Dark, grainy water rushes over her hands. Long lengths of kelp lay like bloated corpses on the sand, their bodies dark and shiny. A gull cries out, close enough to her ear that she cowers away from it. The fog is too thick for her to see. 

She is tiny, a little animal with little fingers and little toes. Her knuckles are swollen, each finger purple and blue. It’s hard to bruise fingers. Takes an incredible amount of force. A doctor told her that once, she thinks. Easier under the weight of a boot. Her jaw starts to ache, the pain inching slowly down her neck. Then, like an itch in the back of her brain, she knows she isn’t alone. Fawn turns, shielding her eyes as though it will break up the fog. Figures bob in the distance. Just shapeless shadows. Beside her in the sand, a starfish twitches. Like an inhale. Drowning, drowning on so much dry land. Fawn watches as it writhes, as its little legs stutter, watches as it stills. She gasps, arching into the darkness in her room, her own bed. She isn't so small anymore. Her fingers aren't bruised, her knees aren't skinned. The air is dry here. It smells like cedar. The ocean is a lifetime away.

“I was off my game.”

“Oh yeah?” Adam sounds a little echo-y. Like maybe he’s taken a couple adderall, like maybe he hasn’t slept in a little while either.

Fawn’s surprised that he answered this late, actually. That he was awake enough to make jokes about her calling him from a landline. It makes her feel a little lonely. That both of them are here, alone in their respective houses, nothing better to do on a Friday night than this. Fawn found a bag of stale pretzels in the back of the pantry two days ago. She plops one into her mouth, lets it go soft on her tongue. The tv is still playing softly in the background. She can’t bring herself to turn it off. The silence is deafening without it. “Yeah, I mean I let him intimidate me. I folded like it was my first day on the job.”

She hears Adam yawn. “I mean honestly, it sounds like a kinda claustrophobic place.”

Fawn scoffs. “There’s probably one person for every ten square miles out here, Adam. _If that.”_

“Exactly. It doesn’t really matter how big the place is if you’ve only got like fifty people to choose from.”

Fawn shrugs, reaching over to crack open a coke. None of them have any carbonation left and she hasn’t bothered to put the ones she’s got left in the fridge. Christ, her blood sugar has to be through the roof these days. Can't remember the last time she ate more than one meal in a day, or anything with a green vegetable. “I just…I think it wigged me out that he knew I was a reporter.”

She hears Adam sit up a little. “Wait, this cult guy knew you were a reporter?”

Fawn brushes a few strands of hair from her face. “Yeah.”

“Does he know _who_ you are?”

“I don’t think so?” Fawn scratches at her neck.

“How the hell did he know that you were a reporter then?”

Fawn twists the cord around her finger. It makes her feel a little nostalgic, like she's a kid again. Her stomach tightens. “I mean, it’s a small place. And I’ve been candid about the story I’m doing,” Fawn massages her jaw, “mostly."

“Didn’t you tell me this cult was like really isolated though?”

Fawn reaches unconsciously for her folder, thicker now, her scrawled notes covering the outside. “I mean, I said I _thought_ they might be. I don’t know that for sure.”

“Uh-huh.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“No, what?”

“Just kind of spooky, you know?” A wind picks up, rattling the little house’s front door. The screen is tattered, the hinges a little rusty. One hard shove is all it would take, one powerful wind. It rattles again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading <3 <3 <3


	6. June 8th, 2019

Fawn picked up two canisters of instant coffee at the grocery store. She drank exclusively bean back in New York, but Fawn finds that she sort of digs the grainy texture of the instant stuff. Likes too the way it’s streamlined all her old routines. She doesn’t have to wait for her French press anymore, doesn’t have to fuck with washing it out.

But as she sits at Holly Pepper’s old worn kitchen table, soft light streaming in through the gaps in the blinds, Fawn thinks that what she might like best is the thick sludge that forms at the bottom of the mug. Too sweet. Too dark. Her teeth ache when she drinks it.

She drums her nails on the kitchen table. The book feels like a houseguest. She’s a poor host, keeps it across the table like it might bite. Fawn sighs, scrapes her nails through her hair just a little too hard and slides the book closer to her.

It’s a slim little volume, slimmer than she expected and as she flips through it, she finds that the text is oddly spaced. Like they were trying to make it longer, like they were trying to fill the space. The paper is thin like the translucent pages of a bible, but the cover is almost too thick, makes the book so heavy it feels like a weapon. Fawn rolls her shoulders, ties her hair up, lets the sun streaming in through the window warm the bare skin of her back. She takes another sip of coffee. She’s stalling. The book is spooking her.

But she has to read it. Honestly, she should have read it weeks ago. It should have been the first fucking thing she did. But there’s something about it, it’s kept her at bay. She settles back into Holly Pepper’s rickety dining room chair. She raps her nails again on the table and takes a deep breath. It’s just a book. She opens it.

For a book that has caused this much fuss, it’s not all that impressive. Joseph rambles and not compellingly either, often with no destination and sometimes the syntax is so strange that Fawn has to read it twice to just get an inkling of what he’s trying to say. She remembers, flipping through her notes, that Joseph spent most of his adult life homeless and wonders if he’d gotten any substantive formal education at all. Because this, _this,_ reads like the diary of a man who is, as far as she can tell, not really all that introspective or articulate. It’s page after page of navel gazing, written in the laziest, most rushed way possible. The only thing compelling about his narrative at all is the Voice. An amorphous, all-seeing thing he slots in on the first page and refuses to elaborate on. She figures that most people reading this shit have already drunk the Kool-Aid, though, so maybe he doesn’t need to. _Schizoid trait or manipulation tactic?_ she scrawls in the margin, makes a note to prioritize meeting him, or at least getting a good look at him. She should be able to tell right away which one it is. Fawn takes another sip of coffee then dives back in.

She’s skimming, mostly, even she knows she should be dissecting. Taking notes, carefully trying to unravel the story Joseph is presenting. But it’s hard to focus on his words and Fawn finds herself looking for one name in particular. Because she can still smell him, can still see his reaching fingers when she closes her eyes. She finds him.

_He had started beating our little brother John._

Fawn’s pen hovers over her notes. She is not a green reporter. She has seen worse than this, of course. That singular line isn’t even in the ballpark of the shit she had to sift through for her Epstein article. And yet, there’s something about the way Joseph has set it up, the way he’s grounded it, that makes her heart hurt just a little. Maybe there is a method to his madness, after all. Because the John he introduces in this first chapter is all sweetness, all softness. Big blue eyes and a holey smile. A boy holding tight to his worn blanket, a boy who seems desperate to make everything and everyone okay, a boy struggling to understand the world that is collapsing all around him. A boy covered in the bruises his father gave him. Fawn kneads at her temples. She’s only ten pages in and already she wants to call it a day. And fuck, why shouldn’t she? Maybe it might be an alright afternoon to finally put those hiking boots to the test, explore one of those trails she saw in the local guidebook. Fawn taps her pen against her notepad. No, what she needs to do is work. To figure out what this goddamn article is going to be so she can hightail it back to New York City and show her editor-in-chief that she is _fucking fine._ That she doesn’t need time off, that she’s perfectly okay to come back to work. That _none_ of the things that happened after she wrote _that_ _fucking article_ have affected her _at all_. Fawn breathes heavy through her nose, head heavy in her hands. She’s fine. She’s really fucking fine. She sits up and turns the page.

The reading is easier going after the first mention of John’s name. And maybe it’s because the story that Joseph is ambling along to tell has started to feel just a tinge familiar. She gets up to pour herself another cup of coffee when Joseph gets to the parts with CPS. Glad suddenly that she decided to do this in the middle of the day when the sun is out and the birds are chirping and the leaves of those thick trees outside her windows are waving in the warm breeze. Because otherwise, that darkness might seep right in through the windows, might overtake her. She can feel it, just out of view.

It’s funny how even with Joseph’s meandering, nonsensical style the story has started to affect her. Maybe it’s because she’s filling in his blanks. This is, after all, a story that Fawn knows. She knows, intimately, how long that first drive away is, how cavernous those back seats are. Government cars always smell too clean and they all smell the same. A nothingness so marked that it sticks with you for days, weeks sometimes. Fawn once retched on a DC sidewalk in the middle of the afternoon, hand still gripping the door of her friend’s rental car. The car had the same smell. Christ, it’s just such a specific feeling. A fear so nameless, so out of body, that it is all-consuming, licks up you like a hungry fire. And, god, that voice social workers have, all of them, the saccharine softness that is, she knows, supposed to sound soothing but instead just intensifies that terror, gilds it with pity. Joseph has included none of this in the book. It is a play by play, devoid of emotion, but Fawn knows that those three brothers, sitting quietly in the backseat of some state-owned car, must have been overtaken by dread. Fawn wonders if the system in rural Georgia was much different than in south LA or if it’s all the same shit no matter where you go. She wonders if John Seed got wailed on like she did, one hand unconsciously rising to her cheek. She gingerly touches the skin there, memories aching inside of her. 

The next part is fishy, honestly probably bullshit and she marks the margins to reflect that. The institutions, the abuse, the burning barn. It reads a little like what someone who’s never lived it might imagine foster care to be like. The old hokey movie version of being a ward of the state. Nothing Joseph describes rings at all true to the Fawn’s own experience of carpeted waiting rooms and free clinic physicals. But even with Joseph’s bland descriptions, she can still imagine a young John Seed, those blue eyes wide with fear watching as flames lick up the side of their foster parent’s barn. Fawn hesitates, then makes a note. Their shared background might be a way in, a point of connection, but she can’t really figure out how she’d ever be able to use it without tearing herself open in the process. She’s never had to talk about it before, not since she turned eighteen. Hasn’t spent much time thinking about it either, not if she can help it. Because it leads down paths she doesn’t want to go and when Joseph writes that the Seeds are the last in a tainted bloodline, she wanders down another old path, can’t help herself once she’s started. The idea of rot at the roots, the fear of it. Fawn’s medical records went digital two years ago and she’d been scrolling lazily through them one night when she’d stumbled across the very first record in the system. An old, sort of blurry scan from the hospital where she’d been born.

_Fawn Honeychurch  
_ _June 8 th, 1993  
_ _3lbs, 2 oz; born 34 weeks  
_ _Neonatal abstinence syndrome  
_ _Mother tested positive for opiates upon intake  
_ _CPS contacted_

She’d wondered, as she read that short little passage over and over again, how many doctors saw that record and looked at her just a little differently afterward. If the persona she’d carefully constructed since college slipped suddenly away and she became a ragged, helpless junkie’s daughter just like she had been all her life. Fawn takes another sip of coffee. It’s gone a little cold.

The Duncan’s aren’t mentioned by name in the book. Fawn makes a note of that. She wonders if it’s a stylistic oversight or some deliberate attempt to erase them, wonders if the other brothers had any say about the contents of this book. But even without their names, Fawn is starting to get a sense of them. Religious. Very. Wealthy. _Very_. And something else. Something darker, a little more complex, than the standard whuppings she got from some of her foster parents. She remembers one of the pictures from the dossier. A still from an Atlanta society column of a handsome John Seed in a well-tailored suit standing at the head of two ornate coffins, his face betraying absolutely nothing. A car accident, if she remembers the article right. On a slick mountain pass coming back from Aspen. They’d been killed instantly. And, actually, now that Fawn’s thinking about it, the article didn’t mention that he’d been adopted at all. None of the articles about him mention it, or his brothers. Fawn frowns. Was that what the Duncan’s doing or something he’d insisted on as an adult? It seems unlikely that a man who’d eventually take his old last name would try to obscure that part of himself. She couldn’t really blame him, though, if he’d wanted to erase it. Almost no one in her life now knows she was even in the system, much less chewed up and spit out by it. She never lied per se, just stretched the truth. Cancer, car accident, whatever. _That’s why I don’t have parents._ People don’t want to pick at open wounds. Fawn always made hers bloody. But benign. Everything was normal _until_ instead of nothing has ever been normal. Not even once. Fawn massages her neck, flinching at how tight it is. She feels like she’s been up for days, been reading this for hours and hours and the book’s waded back into full nutjob territory again. John’s the confessor, the Baptist. Obsessed with sin, marked by it. She’s not really sure what the fuck it means, but it’s really kicking up her nerves. She tries to remember that this is just some nothing religious group in the middle of fuckall nowhere. Which is soothing until she remembers Waco was a nothing religious group out in fuckall nowhere. The People’s Temple too. Jonestown 2.0 indeed.

Christ, she needs a drink. Fawn shuts the book and pushes it across the table away from her. She stands, stretching her shoulders, then heads toward the door. That case of beer is still in the trunk of her station wagon. Christ knows it’s probably flat as a pancake now, but she just needs something to settle her nerves and she’s all out of weed.

It’s a beautiful day out. Just the right temperature, the sun hanging brightly in another cloudless sky. Fawn takes a deep breath, lets the scent of pine and that delicate sweetness of alder wood wash over her. She hefts the beer out of her truck and sets it onto the driveway so she can just take a minute. It rained the night before and the drive is still a mess of mud, animal prints leaving deep craters along its surface. The pines that flank it seem especially tall today and a few sprays of tiny, colorful flowers dot the undergrowth. Fawn looks down the little hill to see two Eden’s Gate trucks rumbling down the road, their beds packed with crates. She watches them go, makes a mental note of the direction they’re heading. East, she thinks, over toward the Henbane River Basin.

When she comes back inside, beer balanced on her hip, she finds the voicemail button on her corded phone blinking. FAWn sets the beer down heavily on the table and just stares. There’s a short list of people who have this landline number, not counting, of course, whoever Holly Pepper used to know. Still though, she’d forgotten that unique pre-caller ID dread. 

Fawn stows a couple of the beer in the fridge, exhaling loudly as she shuts the door. She glances back over at the phone, drumming her fingers on the front of the fridge. She sighs then heads over and lets the message play.

It’s a relief to hear Adam’s voice, even if he does sound a little worn out. He’s still chipper though, teasing. “Christ,” he starts out. She can hear him cracking open a beer, imagines that he’s probably at his desk, feet up beside his computer. “I cannot remember the last time I left anyone a voicemail, but I figure calling back is useless since you live in the sticks now. Anyway,” she hears him shift, hears him drag his feet off his desk, “just calling to wish you a happy birthday, Fawnie. Hope you figure out something fun to do.” Fawn frowns. Her birthday? Is it really? She glances at the calendar on the fridge. It’s from 2018. October still pinned open. Fawn pulls her purse out from under the kitchen table, roots around for her phone _. June 8 th, 2019. 3:15 pm._ It really is her fucking birthday. She sets her phone down on the table, waits until it goes dark again. She’d forgotten.

“I’m 26.”

Mary May quirks an eyebrow, finishes wiping down the counter then leans over the bar. ”25. We comparing ages?”

Fawn laughs a little weakly, pushing the fries around on her plate. The Spread Eagle’s quiet tonight. Just a few people at the bar, a middle-aged couple slow dancing by the jukebox. There’s another storm in the forecast, she’d heard that on the radio coming over and a familiar electricity has settled in the air. Fawn plops a cold fry into her mouth. “No, I mean, today I’m 26. Like,” Fawn shrugs, “I don’t know, like today is my first day of being 26.”

Mary May quirks an eyebrow up. “Is everybody from the big city this weird about their birthday?” Fawn laughs, for real this time, loosening up a little. She leans on her hands, letting her hair fall a little in her face. Fuck, she’s tired. She feels weary like an old man and considers, wildly, asking Mary May if she can just curl up and get some shut-eye behind the bar. But Mary May’s already in motion, digging through a drawer under the register until she comes back with a single brightly colored birthday candle in her fist, big grin on her face. She shoves the candle into the top bun of Fawn’s half-eaten burger.

Fawn cocks an eyebrow. “Really?”

Mary May leans down, still smiling. It takes her two tries to light her match. “Beggars can’t be choosers, right?”

“You don’t have to do this, really.”

“Sure I do. Can’t have a birthday without getting sung to. My daddy used to say that.” She straightens up, waving the match until it goes out. Then she smiles. Then she starts to sing. “Happy birthday to you.” Mary May’s keeping her voice down, singing a little off-key. Fawn blushes, waving her off. She glances around at the bar. The few stragglers have gone quiet, watching her now. “Happy birthday to you.” Casey pokes his head out of the kitchen, smiles when he sees the two of them at the bar. “Happy birthday dear Fawn.” Mary May starts to sway. She’s got a nostalgic look in her eyes, a faraway smile. “Happy birthday to you.” Fawn closes her eyes and blows the candle out. Smoke trails from it, a slender, feathery line spiraling up into the half-light of the bar. Fawn watches it go, watches it disappear into nothing. She feels buoyant, a little weightless. Like her whole life exists only within these four walls. Like she was born today, here in this bar. Mary May slides another beer across the bar at her. “Now I bet a fancy city slicker like you ain’t never had a birthday like that.”

Fawn smiles, resting her head on her hands. “Nope, never like that.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading <3\. I so, so appreciate all your comments and kudos.


	7. June 9th, 2019

Fawn’s third foster dad smoked Marlboro reds. She can remember the smell, sometimes will catch a whiff, conjured from the ether. He smoked so many that his teeth and the tips of his fingers were yellowed. He’d send her, sometimes, to the corner store five blocks down from his stucco house to pick them up, an extra few dollars tucked into her pocket for the tamales that old woman sold on the corner. Fawn remembers how he smiled a little crooked. How he’d throw his head back every time he laughed. How he’d wait for her every day to come from school on his narrow front porch. How they’d sit together on his threadbare couch and watch jeopardy while dinner cooked in the oven. She ate a lot of frozen pizza that year, drank a lot of mountain dew. Still managed to be underweight for her age, but had ten cavities by summer.

He’d taught her how to change a tire once and even though she could probably draw the laugh lines around his eyes by heart, she cannot for the fucking life of her remember what she’s supposed to do now that she’s crouched on the side of a pitch dark highway in nowhere Montana looking at the twisted rubber that used to be her front left tire.

She’d spent the afternoon and better part of the evening scouting a little along the perimeter of the state park, trying to get a sense of the size of the place. She’d seen a couple cult trucks ramble through as turned to head back to the Holland Valley, but these folks had looked almost friendly. Nothing like what she’d seen so far. Sure, they had the same eerie smile as those Hari Krishna weirdos she use to see hanging around UCLA, but they’d waved as they passed. Not a single gun in sight. It has been only a few minutes into her drive that her car spun out, a bang so loud that her first instinct had been to take her hands off the wheel and cover her ears.

The hole’s so big it looks like a mouth, a ragged row of teeth. She can put her whole fist through it. Fuck the universe. Fuck Montana. Fuck old, worn out tires. Fawn stands, scraping her fingers through her hair. Her open door ding, ding, dings, the faint red light spilling onto her bare thighs. There’s a highway sign for the Henbane River just down the way, but beyond that, she can’t see a thing. She can feel the forest though, feel it looming, hear the pine boughs shivering in the breeze. But nothing else. She might be the only person alive in the world.

A bolt of lightning comes searing across the sky, skimming the mountaintops, revealing, for just that split second, the whole of the Valley, then going dark again, like turning out a light. A long, low roll of thunder rumbles across the empty highway, so much louder than she’s ever heard it in her life. The sound echoing against the wide, starry sky. Fawn can taste the electricity in the air. The stars pulse when she looks at them, blurry like she’s a little stoned. Fawn frowns. She isn’t. It’s too warm for her to see her breath, but the air in her lungs feels like an echo. Fawn feels so small under this swirling sky and then, in that perfect, terrifying stillness, she hears a truck rumbling down the road. Just a singular truck, its headlights flashing over her as it takes that long corner. The paramedics covered her third foster dad with a sheet as they carried him through their small living room. She couldn’t see his face, but she saw a thin line of blood just under the bump where his nose poked up at the sheet. A major coronary, her social worker told her a week later in her dingy downtown office. His heart so sick of being in his body that it came out through his mouth. Fawn remembers as the truck slows to a stop in front of her that singular feeling of being alone in a room full of people, of barreling headfirst again into the unknown.

It’s not an Eden’s Gate truck, at least. It’s a black chevy that looks as shiny and clean as if it just rolled off the lot. Fawn stares at her own reflection, the windows too tinted even in the dark for her to see through then she turns to look down the empty highway. The air still feels slow around her, like time is slowing with it, but when she looks back at the truck the air sharpens. Because she’s not looking at her reflection anymore. She’s looking at the smiling face of John Seed. Fawn can barely stifle a gasp, walks back a half step, before shoring herself back up. “Well, I'll be.” He grins even wider and smooths back his dark hair, setting the sunglasses that had been atop his head onto the dash. He leans over to open the passenger door. Fawn takes another step back as it swings open. The radio’s playing, just low. It’s that song again, the one with the melody she doesn’t recognize. “We meet again, little reporter.” Fawn says nothing. She has nothing to say. There’s a wide field at her back and she can imagine herself turning heel and just running. Screaming, her lungs burning, hair flying behind her as she goes. She imagines him in pursuit and terror coils in her gut. And something else. John glances past her, then meets her eyes. “Looks like you’re having car trouble.”

Fawn swallows hard. “You could say that, yeah.”

John’s eyes glitter. “Let me take a look, hmmm?”

“That’s alright. I don’t need you to…” But he’s not listening. He slides out of the truck, his boots loud when they land on the asphalt. He’s graceful, agile. And so quick that Fawn barely has time to think before he’s in front of her again, close enough that she can smell that cologne again, that sharp musk.

“I think we got off on the wrong foot.” He extends his hand. “John Seed.”

Fawn should smile. She should introduce herself, should shake his hand. She should try to get an in. But instead, she just crosses her arms over her chest. “I know who you are.”

John’s smile never falters. “Then you have me at a disadvantage.”

There’s something about this air. Something about all this fucking open space. It makes her feel tiny. It makes her feel so young. She swallows hard. “I’m Fawn.”

“Fawn?” He smiles again but this one is different, looks more real. He chuckles. “Really?”

“Yeah?”

He cocks his head. “No last name?”

“Nope.”

He chuckles, looking off down the road. Fawn glances at his chest. The scar is still mostly covered by his shirt, by the vest he’s got buttoned up over it. But she can see now that it’s a word. A word carved into his skin. A chill races up her. She doesn’t want to stare too long, doesn’t want him to catch her staring. He twists a little, his shirt revealing more of him and Fawn catches sight of another tattoo, this one just under his collarbone, the bottom wing of a small bird, the rest hidden. He saunters over to her car and crouches down, reaching out to touch her tire. The light from her car reflects on his watch. It’s big, looks expensive. He examines the tire, nimble fingers tracing the edges of the tear. Fawn feels, suddenly, calm. Handled. It freaks her out. She straightens up and takes a hard look at him. He’s limber, careful. Strangely respectful of the tire. She remembers, humiliatingly, how she’d cum imagining the very same fingers she’s looking at now. John shakes his head, chuckling. “How did you manage this, hmmm?” He stands and Fawn takes a reflexive step backward. He glances back at the tire. “No, that tire is cut clean through. No patch job will hold. I have a jack, but no spare.” He stands, wiping his hands on his jeans. They look expensive and his face twists briefly in disgust when he looks down at his hands. “I'm more than happy to give you a ride.” He looks up, eyes glittering in the darkness.

“You don’t even know where I’m going.”

A flash of irritation passes over him, but then he’s all smiles again. “Let’s just say my evening’s wide open.” Fawn swallows hard, glancing again down the highway. It’s empty. Not a single car has passed in the time since John pulled over. Fawn looks back at John. He placid, waiting. An almost glacial patience settled over his face. She tries to remember what she read about him in the dossier, in the book. But she can’t. All she can see are his dark tattoos, the bright blue of his eyes, the word cut deep into his chest, the one she can’t read. Fawn takes hold of the truck’s open door, like she needs to moor herself to something. “Well.” He rests his hands on his hips, “are you coming?”

Fawn’s lips part. She watches him watch her. She feels young and small and the air has started to get caught in her lungs and yet. _And yet._ Another flash of lighting skims across the sky. Fawn waits for the thunder. The darkness is so complete around them. They might be the only two people in the world. “Yeah, okay.” A wide grin spreads across John’s face. Thunder booms as Fawn slides into the cab of the truck. Another crack of lightning illuminates the whole Valley. It looks green and dense and contained in that starry sky like a little globe. Beside her, John puts the truck in gear. 

There’s something about the way John’s driving, slow and easy, that reminds her of being picked up from the airport, that relief after a long trip, the enveloping quiet after the shock of the plane, the airport. She should be terrified of him. Or at least wary. Though as they cruise quietly along the highway, Fawn can’t help but feel a little embarrassed. What was there really to be afraid of? Sure, Mary May had a strong reaction to him, to the whole cult, but Fawn doesn’t really know Mary May all that well either. She doesn’t know how small town politics work. And besides being a boring exercise in navel-gazing there hadn’t been anything _that_ sinister in the _Book of Joseph._ John Seed is just another lawyer and she has plenty of experience with those. Fawn sighs and settles a little heavier in her seat. They’re warm, plush, and the interior of the truck is meticulously clean. It smells like pine and something else, something almost metallic that is so familiar even if she can’t quite place it.

“Montana is most beautiful in the summer, I think. The dry heat. The clear air.” He looks over at her. “The storms.” A few little drops of rain have started to fall on his windshield.

Fawn appraises him. He looks relaxed, none of that tightly coiled energy she’d seen in the bar or the gas station. “I've only seen it in summer.”

"Ah, of course." He glances over. “And how long are you staying in our beautiful, little county hmm?”

“Not sure.” He hums an affirmative and Fawn looks over at him again. He’s got one hand on the wheel, the other resting almost on the top of her seat, the way he’s arranged showing off the hard lines of his body. When he flashes her a grin, Fawn realizes he’s doing it on purpose and that fear settles in again. And something else. They’re approaching her little neighborhood now, she can see Fall’s End off to her right in the distance and she remembers how dark her house is at night. How sound seems enveloped by that darkness. How it never carries anywhere. “Here’s fine.”

He glances over at her. “There are no houses here.”

“Here’s fine.” She says a little firmer. She’ll walk, she’ll walk that last half mile or so if it means that the cult won’t know where she’s staying. Fawn isn’t sure if she should feel like an idiot for getting into his car in the first place or if she’s foolish for feeling afraid now, but all she wants is to be out of this fucking truck. 

John laughs, but it’s tinged with something else. Something that makes all the small hairs on her body stand on end. But he does as she asks, slowing the truck over onto the shoulder. “Well then.” He kills the engine. The blue darkness casts shadows on his face, accentuating the handsome lines of his face. “I suppose that will be it then.” Then he grunts, holding up a finger for her to wait. He reaches over to the glove box, his hand brushing against her arm. Electric where their skin touches. He pulls out one of those thick fliers for Eden’s Gate. “I’m sure Mary May will know a good tow.” He fishes a pen out from the center console and takes the cap off with his teeth. “And if she doesn’t,” he scrawls a number onto the paper, “you can give me a call.” He grins. “Maybe I’ll see you at a sermon.”

Fawn takes the paper, ducks under the strap of her messenger bag. “Not really a church kind of girl.”

He smiles. “I think you’ll find the Father’s word is quite unlike any church you know.”

That night she dreams about shag carpet. About congealed blood. She dreams about the burnt sugar smell of heroin. She finds herself on her hands and knees and doesn’t think to get up. Her fingers disappear into the carpet as she goes, crawling on her knees toward a door she knows only instinctually is there. Water seeps from the base when she finds it. Warm as it rushes up around her body, the thick scent of chlorine hanging in the back of her throat. Or maybe bleach. She crawls through and the water deepens until she’s sputtering and it is only when it starts to rush into her mouth that she remembers she can stand. And so she does, water sluicing off her body, and finds that the house that was behind her is gone and the water is no longer warm.

It’s the clean chill of a mountain river. She walks forward through it, the quiet sound of it lapping at her hips broken only by the melody of crickets, the hooting of a lone owl. She is bathed in the glow of headlights. A truck. She hears the door open, hears it slam closed. She can hear heavy footsteps on the shore.

Fawn wakes up shaking. Her heart trembling in her chest. She stumbles out of her bed, out into the hallway, searching for the corded phone. She’d written the Spread Eagle’s number on a sticky note beside the phone and she tries it. It goes to voicemail. Once, twice. She sets the phone down with a heavy sigh. Behind her, the router she bought from the tackle shop blinks and blinks. It hasn’t managed to connect to the internet yet. An owl hoots from a low hanging branch beside her kitchen window.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading <3


	8. June 16th, 2019

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’ve always been really fascinated by that off-handed comment one of the NPC’s makes about Staci Pratt being a real douchebag. Like what kind of a douchebag, you know? So I figured I’d take a crack at it.

The sheriff won’t answer her phone calls, but there are other ways to get what she wants. And as Hope County Sheriff’s Deputy Staci Pratt cracks open a can of PBR from the driver’s seat of his patrol car, Fawn wonders if maybe she’s miscalculated. He takes a sip and passes it over the center console to her. Yeah, she thinks, taking a warm sip, she fucked up. He thinks this is some kind of date.

They’d met at the Spread Eagle a few days before. He’d approached her with the kind of swagger that made it immediately clear that he is, or at least thinks he is, a big fish in this small town. He’d done the whole _hey sweet thing_ bit Fawn figured only happened in movies, but she’d seen the badge glittering on his shirt and decided to grin and bear it. At least this time she could say it was a tactical move and not a masochistic impulse, the memory of slipping into John Seed’s truck still fresh in her mind.

She’d mentioned, over the lip of her beer, that she was a reporter from New York City. Guessed correctly that something like that might pique his interest. So she hadn’t really been surprised when he’d written his number down on a napkin. She’d taken it with a smile, folding it and slipping it into her purse, figuring this might be her best way in. Maybe her only way in. Which is how she’s ended up here. Sitting in a squad car on an overcast afternoon, idling on the shoulder of the highway just a few yards from that rickety metal bridge she’d seen from a distance her first week in Hope County. Somehow it’s even creepier up close. The metal has been painted a dull red, so weatherworn that she can see some peeled bits twitching in the breeze. The supports groan in the wind. Fawn fidgets in her seat.

Staci rolls his window down. A warm breeze filters in, settling on Fawn’s bare legs. The shorts were another tactic – she’d seen Staci eyeing her legs back at the bar – but one that she’s starting to regret. It’s thoroughly summer now but every so often there’s a little nip in the wind, coming down from the snowcapped mountains. She soothes the goosebumps racing up her legs with her fingers, trying not to feel too exposed. Staci lets his hand dangle out the window. He’s unbuttoned the top two buttons on his uniform, revealing a white undershirt and a thick tuft of dark chest hair. It reminds her, vaguely, of the way John sat that night nearly a week ago in his truck. It’s a poor comparison, one she’s not even sure why she’s trying to make.

Fawn scrapes her hair back, tie in her teeth while she tries to smooth it into a half-presentable bun. Staci watches her do it, takes another nip of the PBR and balances it on the center console like an offering. He’s not unattractive. Maybe a little more rugged looking than she’s usually into, sure, but it’s the smug look she’s let to see leave his face that makes her feel just a tinge repulsed. “So,” he puts his free hand on the steering wheel with a grunt, looks out at the highway in front of them, “why does New York care about Montana enough to send a reporter out here, huh?”

“I know this might come as an incredible surprise, but New York, in fact, does not care about Montana.” He doesn’t laugh at her joke. She takes a warm sip of beer and passes it back. She clears her throat, changes her tone. “I’m doing an expose on religion out in the rural West.” She glances over at him. “You people tend to do your own thing out here.”

Staci shrugs. “Not much else to do.” Fawn laughs even though it isn’t funny. She knows his type. Sat in many a car with boys not quite unlike him all through high school. She wonders if he’s too old to casually ask her for road head or if that’s something that cocky jackasses never grow out of. “So how long you out here for, sweetheart.” Fawn tries not to flinch. At least it’s not a full-on proposition.

Fawn looks up at the tall cliffs just to their left, the jagged rockface, the sturdy pines. To her right, tall grasses slope downward toward a quick-moving river, white-tipped rapids kissing the faces of sharp rocks. “Not sure. Maybe a couple months.”

“Well if you hear the peggies tell it that’s all the time we got.” He drains the beer and tosses it out his window. Fawn watches in disgust as it bounces along the gravel, nestling finally in a little tuft of grass, teetering a little toward the river.

Then it dawns on her. She blinks up at him. “Wait, what?”

“The collapse. Heard some shit on Peggy radio about how it’s is gonna start this fall or some shit.”

Fawn digs her notepad out of her bag, flips to the first clean page, clicking her pen on her bare thigh. She jots _peggy radio?_ in the margin. Then, _collapse?_ Underlines it twice. So much for this not being a doomsday cult. Her gut twists a little. Staci bristles when he sees her writing. “This some kind of interview?”

She glances up at him. “You’re off the record.”

He scoffs. “This why you wanted to ride along?”

“I told you that.” She sees him roll his eyes from her peripheries. She _had_ told him that, even if she’d done it through her thick lashes after a couple of beers. “So what’s the collapse?”

“I don’t know. Sounds pretty self-explanatory doesn’t it?”

It’s Fawn’s turn to roll her eyes. “I mean, what did they say about it?”

He shrugs. “Didn’t catch all that much really. Try not to listen to that shit too much.”

She leans forward, reaching for the radio. “Do you mind if I?”

He practically swats her hand away. “Whoa now, I’m on the clock. We can’t just be listening to the radio on county time.” She glances in the direction he tossed his empty beer can but says nothing.

They’re quiet on the drive back toward Fall’s End. Staci keeps the window open, drives just a touch too fast and the wind as they go is a steady roar, broken up only by occasional chatter from the CB radio. Fawn’s trying to keep her thoughts from racing, because she needs to fucking focus. Because the moment she steps back into that house of hers she needs to get to work. If the cult is preaching about an _imminent_ end of the world that changes the angle of her article entirely. This could be front-page shit, not just the afterthought article she thought it might turn out to be.

She’s so deep in her own thoughts that she almost misses the gathering in front of them on the road until it’s too late. All Eden’s Gate trucks, gathered on the side of the gravel drive leading down to the tackle shop. “Hey, um,” she nods toward the trucks, “do you mind if we…”

Staci just shrugs, slowing the patrol car. “Whatever. Probably should be keeping an eye on these assholes anyway.” 

They pull off onto the dirt shoulder, Fawn bouncing in her seat as they roll over the rough terrain. Staci flashes his lights, just once, sending a couple of the cultists scattering toward the trucks closer to the shop. She could throttle him, but instead just leans forward, squinting to get a better look. There seems to be some sort of small procession heading down toward the tackle shop. A few locals, clad in cowboy hats, are watching them advance. “What are they all doing here?”

“Who knows.”

She raises an eyebrow. “Shouldn’t you, a _police officer_ , be keeping a little better track?”

“What for? Not illegal to be a dick bag.”

Fawn scoffs. Wishes that some dark, masochistic part of her didn’t find him just a little bit charming. She’s always been so terrible with men. And she’s about to retort when she sees Joseph. Her words die on her tongue. She can tell immediately that it’s him, even from far away. He’s shirtless even though it’s not nearly warm enough for him to be, his upper body scattered with tattoos and deep-set scars. Words. Like John. Her chest tightens. She’s too far away to make out what they say. Joseph doesn’t head down toward the shop like the others. Instead, he starts toward Staci’s patrol car, greeting each of the cult members as they pass him with a slight nod of his head. He reaches out every so often to press two fingers gently onto one of their foreheads.

Fawn shifts to sit a little higher in her seat, eager to get a better look. She rummages blindly for her notepad, clicks her pen open again. Manson-y is the first thought that comes to her mind. She could never use that word in the article without getting chewed out by her editor, but she’ll fix it later, figure out something a little less canned. For now, it fits. He has a sort of sloping way of walking, too deliberate to be casual, but a gait that implies a certain level of detachment. She bets it’s something he’s practiced. The two women on either side of him have it too. They sway beside him, their matching linen dresses fluttering in the breeze. The women have a sort of dreamy look in their eyes, their hair a little unkempt, nearly down to their elbows. They unnerve her more than Joseph does. Their slack mouths and devoted gazes.

As he moves closer, Fawn can see the harsh outline of his ribs. He’d be almost scrawny if his frame weren’t so broad. He looks, instead, like a man who often forgets to eat. It implies a certain level of austerity that Fawn imagines comes in handy when he preaches the self-denial she’d read so much about in his book. She cranes her neck to catch a better look at his face.

John is obviously the most handsome of the brothers, but Joseph has a certain aura about him. His mousy colored hair is pulled back into a bun, his beard much shorter than most of his followers, but still unkempt. Nothing like John’s carefully combed facial hair. His translucent yellow sunglasses bring out the sallowness in his skin, but Fawn gets the aesthetic. He looks like a hip Jim Jones. When Joseph turns, leaning in to speak with the driver of one of the trucks, Fawn can see that there are two armed men at his back, bullets belted across their chests. Fawn swallows hard, glancing over at the handgun in Staci’s belt. “Is he allowed to do that? Just have big ass guns out here in the open?”

“Yup.” Staci sounds almost bored. 

“Any idea why they might have them?” Her pen hovers over her notepad. "Something about this collapse?"

“Shit, I don’t know. Everybody out here has guns.” He laughs to himself, “If this has your panties in a twist you should see the operation they’ve got up in the Whitetails. Cult’s practically building an army. Stockpiling weapons and shit, running drills.”

She spins to look at him, reeling. “Are you fucking serious?” He nods, fiddling with the radio. “Why haven’t you like…called the, I don’t know, the national guard or something.”

“Militia’s ain’t illegal.”

“I think they are, actually.”

“Well, welcome to Montana. They’re not even close to the only militia in this county.”

“What the fuck.” She makes a quick note about it, to look it up when she finally gets some internet. When Fawn looks back over the dash, Joseph has slowed, the women slowing around him. She watches him take a deep breath, press his eyes closed. They fly open again and his gaze is trained directly onto her. Fawn fights the impulse to duck down under the dash, to hide her face with her hands. His eyes don’t leave her, but his hands open, palms spread out toward her at his sides. She can do nothing but stare back, fear racing up her spine.

Staci starts the car again. The sound of it pulls Fawn away from his gaze. “Fucking freaks.” They peel out onto the road so quickly that Fawn has to brace herself against the door handle to stay upright. “Hate those losers.” She just looks at him. That horrible dread has settled all around her again. Fawn glances back down the road. He’s still looking, Palms still open. _Like Christ on the cross_. What a bizarre thought. She shuts her eyes.

There’s something about a baby. Fawn had all three of the brother’s names before she left New York City. Joseph Jacob John. She’d done what she’d been trained to do, an engrained reflex by now, and pulled all their public records, printed out copies, stuffed them into her folder. She’d done a cursory look through, sure, but she’d had other things on her mind as she fled west and the baby had slipped the net. Joseph’s baby. Or, more accurately, the disappearance of it.

She has a record of his marriage. Wed to Anita Gonzalez in 1994 at the Fulton County Courthouse in downtown Atlanta. He was 20. In the picture she’d managed to scrounge up, Anita doesn’t look older than eighteen. They both look like kids. He dressed in an ill-fitting shirt and tie, she in a threadbare little white dress, posing for the camera against a wallpapered backdrop that Fawn figures it at the very back of the courthouse. Probably the same spot they do bookings.

Anita’s a pretty woman with big dark eyes and thick black hair. And she is beaming, holding tightly onto a Joseph who looks nothing like the man Fawn saw that afternoon. He looks young and terrified, just a little shell-shocked, like whatever he’s seeing in front of him is frightening. He is standing stiffly, almost at attention. Anita seems to be squeezing his arm, seems to be trying to forcibly drag him into the happy moment, like she knows he’s looking like a man facing a firing squad. She is also visibly, heavily pregnant.

Fawn flips through the papers in her folder one more time. There’s no record of a baby, living or dead. There should be a birth certificate or a death certificate. There should be _something._ Fawn glances over at her blinking router, flips her laptop open. The wifi searches and searches and finds nothing. She shuts it a little too hard, groaning. If she were back in her office in New York this wouldn’t be a fucking problem. She’d have Anita Gonzalez’s life story in thirty minutes tops. Birth certificate, high school diploma, whatever. A few more calls and she’d have a job history, a basic family tree. But here all she has her notes. And her intuition. And her intuition is telling her that someone horrible has happened to this woman, to this baby. Because for all that dry, rambling exposition in that book of his, Anita is not mentioned, not even once.

The sound of a truck rumbling down the road spooks her. She sits bolt upright, body still, listening to the sound. It’s not passing like it normally does, but instead coming closer. She starts to tremble and when the first beams of light passes by her front window she ducks under the dining room table. It feels familiar, like a reflex. She pushes the thought aside, pours all her focus into staying quiet, staying still. She’s shaking now for real, trying to keep it together well enough to listen carefully, to make a plan. The headlights are still shining through her front windows and she can hear a truck idling. She’s glad she kept most of the lights off, glad that the house must look deserted. Until she hears the first quiet footsteps. She holds her breath, listens to the porch groaning under new weight. And then, a long pause. She can hear muffled voices, a faint scratching at her door. The moment is endless, cavernous. And then she hears the truck roar back to life. Finally exhaling, listening as it pulls away from the house. She watches as the headlights shine through each window, carving a path of light from the kitchen all the way to her bedroom. And then silence. And then darkness.

When she’s sure the truck is gone, she’s a flurry of movement. Digging through the drawers in the living room and kitchen, desperate for a flashlight, furious with herself that she’s waited until now to find one. When she finds one that works, she almost cries out in relief.

Fawn stumbles out onto her porch, flashlight leading the way, and finds the deep gashes of a truck’s tires in her gravel drive. Heavy footprints all around the porch, muddy tracks up to her door, her front window. But the forest is dark and quiet, like the road down the hill, all traces of whoever they were gone now. Fawn exhales, kneading at her temples. She tries to come up with some innocent explanation, but her mind has gone blank. Sighing, she turns on her heel, heading back toward her from door. And then she sees it, tacked to the old white wood. A flier. That same symbol looming at the top and then, in small print at the bottom, an address. She holds it between her fingers then looks out again at the tracks. They curve around her house, almost encircling it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading <3


	9. June 16th, 2019. Before dawn.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I promise that the latter 2/3rds of this fic is going to be very John heavy. I just need to set some stuff up first. If you haven’t noticed, I’m trying to play a little bit with the idea of fate and, just lightly, with prophetic dreams (I hope it’s working lol). Also the smut with John will be much more explicit than the smut in this chapter, don’t worry.

Fawn hears the elevator but ignores it. This late at night it’s probably the cleaning crew starting their rounds. She checks her phone. 1:45 in the morning. Hell, it might even be security. Her desk is way at the far end, away from the elevators. Just a bit down from the editor-in-chief’s closed office. Not right next to the wall of windows, but close enough that the light from the buildings outside filters in over her papers. Twenty-first floor. The dream.

And she’s living it. Her desk is a disaster. Papers stacked haphazardly across it, sticky notes peeling up from her constant shifting. Both monitors are full of tabs, her phone a ticker tape of notifications. She’s in her element. She’s on a fucking role. The buzzing in her blood that’s been fueled partly by caffeine, partly by adrenaline, has kept her awake for days.

Fawn hears a soft, dull thud and looks up. She’s been hunched over this desk for hours, legs pulled crossed onto her chair, going a little numb in the calf, and when the sound repeats itself she realizes suddenly that anyone could be inside the office this late at night. That she hasn’t been paying attention to her surroundings at all. She squints over toward the elevators. All she can see is a figure shrouded in darkness, the light filtering in from the elevator banks. She tenses, prepared suddenly for something awful, trying to pull herself out of work mode and into something resembling self-preservation. But then he comes into view. Adam. Wrapped in a thick scarf, a weary smile on his face. He winds through the maze of desks, dropping pieces of himself as he goes. His coat on the back of the copyeditors chair, his camera case on the editorial assistant’s desk, and last his hat, plops it right down on her head. Fawn laughs, pulling it off, trying to smooth back her hair. Adam has a wide grin. It doesn’t reach his eyes. She swallows hard. “Hey.”

“Hey yourself.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Came to see you.”

She glances around the empty office, then looks hard back at him. He looks older than she remembers, a little grey at the temples. His handsome face more worn out than she’s ever seen it. “You know, not like I’m not happy to see you or anything, but…I thought you were gonna be in Pyongyang for another two months. At least.” 

His mouth is a hard, thin line. “Nope.” He reaches out to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear, his fingers lingering on her cheek.

Her desk rattles with each thrust, upending papers, sending her cold, half-finished coffee spilling over the edge of its mug. Fawn scrambles for purchase on the divider, her hips rocking almost painfully backward, bumping up against her stapler. Adam kisses her, but just briefly, nipping a little at her lip, before tucking his head in the crook of her neck. Fawn’s trying to hold onto his shoulders, but her fingers keep slipping on the soft fabric of his sweater. His jeans are pushed down just enough to free his cock, the rest of him still fully-clothed. Fawn’s own jeans are twisted around one knee, her panties pushed so quickly to the side that they’re digging painfully into the crease between her thigh and hip. With a grunt, Adam grabs onto her hips and pulls her down harder onto his cock, rocketing his tempo. Fawn lets herself lay back, lets herself be fucked. He’s usually better at this, more generous at the very least and Fawn gets the distinct impression he’s trying to work something out of his system. Her body just a convenient vessel for it. She tries not to feel gross about it.

Fawn doesn’t cum. Adam does. Right at the junction of her thighs, a glob of it in her pubic hair, a little smear of it on the hem of her sweater. Adam heaves for a moment, staring down at the taut skin of her stomach. Then he straightens up and licks two of his fingers. Fawn stops him before he can hunt between her legs, breathless herself. “It’s cool. Don’t worry about it.”

He’s panting, a fine sheen of sweat on his skin. “You sure?”  
“Yeah, yeah.” She lays her head back on the divider, trying to catch her breath. There’s a water stain on the ceiling just above her desk. She frowns at it. “I’m all good.” She glances down at him, he’s settling in her chair, looking a little off-center. “Thanks though.” He nods quietly, brushing his hair back off his face. 

She’s pulling her jeans back up around her hips when she hears Adam make that familiar scrutinizing noise in his throat. She looks back over her shoulder and finds him sifting through her papers, taking care to keep them in the right order. “What are you working on?” He glances up. “Something big?”

“Yeah,” Fawn leans on her desk, facing him now. “Really big.”

“Looks like it.” He rifles through a few more papers. “I mean, holy shit. This might be your…” He trails off, superstition kicking in. Never spoil a scoop.

Fawn grins, drumming her nails on the desk. “Yeah, might be.”

“That’s great.” A pregnant pause. His jaw tenses. “And, um, not to be like that guy or anything, but…”

Fawn laughs. “I know the score.” She leans back against the divider, arms crossed over her chest. “Glad we get our annual friend fuck out of the way.” She glances over at her desk calendar. “And just in time. Gonna be 2019 in a couple of weeks.

He laughs, just a tinge of something bitter in the sound. Fawn’s smile falters, just a little. “Getting to be more than annual these days.”

She cocks her head at him, a teasing look in her eyes. “Semi-annually, then.”

He sighs, slumping a little. “Nice to know that while the rest of the world is changing you manage to stay the same.”

She knows Adam is just thinking out loud, palpably weary from what must have been nearly a whole day of traveling and she tries not to take what he’s just said personally. She sips her coffee and grimaces. It’s over-brewed and chilly. “Is the world really changing all that much?” The look on his face makes her pause. He takes a shuddering breath, pitches a little forward like he might be sick. “You okay?”

“Yeah.” He leans forward all the way in her chair, hands clasped between his open knees. He exhales, looks up at her. There’s something heavy in his look. “I’m asking to be reassigned.” 

She raises both eyebrows. “Whoa.”

“Local”

That surprises her even more. For as long as she’s known him, Adam’s been a moving target. He finished a run in Syria two years ago. The North Korea stint had been the latest, and most lucrative, job of his career. “Like US?”

“Like New York. Like the fucking Bronx.”

Fawn laughs. “Ha, okay sure.”

“I’m serious.”

Fawn frowns. “What? Why? You’re like the best international correspondent this paper’s ever had.”

“Yeah well, now I’m gonna be the best New York slice reviewer this paper’s ever had.”

The silence that falls between them is thick. She can hear the distant sound of traffic all those floors below, muffled by the thick windows, the long whine of a siren. “Did um…did something happen?”

Adam shifts. “You know what? Speaking of New York slice, have you eaten yet? I bet you haven’t”

Her mouth is tight. “Adam did something happen”

He clears his throat. “No. I’m just done with it. I’m getting too old for this.”

“You’re not even forty.”

He manages a grin, nodding in her direction. “And look at you, you little spring chicken. What does that make me? Some kind of cradle robber?”

She scoffs. “Don’t make it weird, Adam.” 

His laugh sounds a little more settled. He leans back in her chair, about to say something to retort when his smile falters, eyes narrowing. “Do you hear that?”

Fawn stills. “Hear what?”

“I’m not sure.” He holds up his hand, listening harder, then turns back to her, brow knitted. “A truck?” Dread settles hard in her chest. Sudden and seemingly out of nowhere. She frowns. There’s something just on the tip of her tongue. Some important, dire thing she needs to tell him, but her mind feels like it’s shifted. Her vision goes a little foggy, glittering at the edges. “No that’s definitely a truck. Like an old 4x4 or something.” 

She blinks down at him. “Here?” She shakes her head. “That doesn’t make any…”

“Doesn’t that sound like a truck to you?” His voice is tight.

It does. Like a truck rumbling down a gravel road. So loud it could be right on their floor, right in their office. The cold coffee on her desk has ripples and the sound is only getting louder. Adam stands. “Holy fuck, where is that even-“ Fawn wakes up gasping, clutching her chest. A thin sheen of sweat on her skin. For a moment, she is suspended in silence, and then the sound rushes in through her open window. That truck. She can hear it crunching on the gravel up to her house. Before she even has a chance to think she’s scrambling out of bed, racing toward the front door. She bursts through it, hair flying wild around her face. “Get the fuck off my property!” She screams into the night. It echoes loudly, clear as a bell in the darkness. “Get out!” She’s never heard herself this shrill. She is still shouting at the top of her lungs, bent over from the force of her own voice when she realizes that she has been shouting at nothing. The road is empty. The muddy footprints from that evening have dried. Everything is perfectly still. The moon hangs low and heavy, its porcelain light reflecting off her skin. Fawn tries to catch her breath, resting her hands on her knees. A bird calls from the nearby tree. Shrill. Mocking. She’s in nothing but her underwear and that old ratty Lakers shirt. The road is quiet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading, guys <3.


	10. June 17th, 2019

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Gotta be honest: I’m obsessed with Faith. I always liked the idea of Faith as formidable in a way that maybe even the Seed brothers don’t understand.

Fawn doesn’t turn down invitations. Pretty much on principle. Especially not when she’s working on a story. Or, well, trying to at least. And how is she supposed to take that flier tacked to her door but as an invitation? And so here she is, driving north along this vast empty highway, the radio cranked way up to silence her racing thoughts.

Fawn pulls off onto the shoulder of the road and kills her engine. That morning, she’d headed back to the lone gas station where she gets a few precious bars of service and googled the address, scrawled directions messily into her notepad. It hadn’t been all that far from her house. Maybe ten miles, but she had to cross that rickety red bridge on the way, the metal groaning under her tires as she drove. Inauspicious.

Fawn cranks down the window, lets the warm breeze roll over her bare skin. She’s in one of the few dresses she brought west with her. A gauzy slip of a thing with a low neckline, a hem that skims the middle of her thighs. It’s a deep yellow, dotted with little white flowers. She looks slight and breezy in it. She looks harmless. Which is, of course, the plan. That morning she’d stared hard at herself in the mirror, let her hair fall down in soft curls, tousled it with her fingers so it looked, _almost,_ like those girls who walked beside Joseph. Fawn flips down the station wagon’s visor, grimaces at herself in the mirror. She doesn’t like looking this way. Especially doesn’t like how easy it was for her to. She leans back against the seat and takes a deep breath. Her chest feels jumpy, her limbs unwieldy and shaky. Like she might just collapse as soon as she opens the car door.

She usually doesn’t get jitters like this. Not about something as simple as a quick drive-by, but the dream is still hanging heavy on her. She rakes her nails through her hair. She’d scrawled ‘Adam’ in pen on the back of her hand. A reminder to call him. Not that she could forget. Jesus fucking Christ that dream had been so vivid. Hardly a dream at all. More like a memory, an almost perfect replica of that night. Fawn woke up tasting Adam in her mouth, feeling his fingers on her hips.

It’s got to be the isolation, she thinks, unbuckling her seatbelt. The wilderness here is so vast, the sky so broad and untouchable. Her thoughts are wild out here. Freer than they’ve ever been.

The air is clean when she opens the door and she takes a deep, long breath. It smells like cedar and pine. Fresh and beautiful and, yet, she can’t relax into it. Fawn toes some of the scrub growing through the rocks on the shoulder of the highway with her sneakers. She should have called Adam that morning. These days she knows he wakes up early, drinks his coffee by those big windows in the office before heading out to cover the local beat. But she’s not even sure what she’d say. Can’t figure out how to ask him about his sudden exit from North Korea and into journalistic obscurity without sounding completely off her rocker. Fawn puts a pin in it, steps out into the warm afternoon air. She shields her eyes from the sun then heads up the gravel path toward the address.

She was expecting a church and so when all she finds at the end of that gravel drive is a squat little storefront it disarms her. Mountains and tall pines loom at its back, making the weather-worn clapboard building look tiny. _Return to the Garden_ is scrawled across a faded banner strung along a wooden fence painted a dull, leaf green. Fawn passes a wood barrel filled with potted flowers. She reaches out, running her fingers over the firm petals of a marigold. The breeze catches the hem of her dress, brushing it across the flowers, yellow to yellow. She smiles a little then glances up, noticing what she should have noticed right away. The path is lined with signs, big as billboards but on poles short enough that most of them are practically at Fawn’s eye level. She scans the horizon, trying to take each of them in. The one with John’s face on it is notably absent and Fawn tucks that information away for later, tries to ignore the way her heart skips a little when she thinks about him. He’s a thrill. She’s always liked those. Fawn musses her hair and takes another deep breath.

The signs run the gambit. A slightly ominous _join us_ tucked at the base of a tall pole. Fawn spots a megaphone at the very top. She makes a mental note about it, tries to ignore the way that dread rolls over her again. It’s easier to do in the bright sunshine.

Fawn turns on the balls of her feet, her back to the building and looks down the gravel circular drive. The tall _we are all angels_ has an ominous ring to it, the _all_ rendered in red paint. _Faith for all_ sits beside it, its more subdued cousin. _Have Faith in the Father_ looms tallest of them all. Fawn grimaces. A truck rolls down the road. She glances back at it and exhales when she sees it isn’t a cult truck, is almost soothed by the two fishing poles poking out of the bed. Another breeze rustles the hem of her dress. The gravel crunches under her sneakers as she walks. The billboard closest to the building is also the smallest. _We love you,_ it says in bold script. She raps her knuckles against it. “Lame.”

The inside is, frankly, pretty bleak. Which surprises her. Because all those billboards are money, so much money, and that book of his is bound in leather. This visitor’s center seems like more of an afterthought. The air is stale inside, like the windows have never been opened. Dust motes float lazily by. It’s a small space, but the sparse furnishing make it seem much larger, almost vacuous. Fawn winds through the squat shelves in the center of the room. The metal they’re made of looks cheap and thin, like she might be able to knock them down with a single, hard shove. Fawn runs her fingers over the spines of his book, arranged in a neat row. She tips one over, watches as the rest fall like dominoes. Her dress swishes around her legs as she turns, the dust following her, scattering in the thick air. Fawn shivers even in the warmth of the room, glancing over at the shelves on the wall beside her. There’s a stack of neatly folded collared shirts laying on the top one. Fawn stands on the tips of her toes to rifle through, finds them eerily blank, the fabric papery to the touch. On a lower shelf, a single line of plain, off white mugs. She picks one up, weighs it in her palm. They look like afterthoughts. Like poorly done set dressing. A whirring pulls Fawn from her thoughts. She glances up to see an old CCTV camera creaking to follow her movement, its red light blinking down at her. A sharp indignation rises up in her, a weirdly intense claustrophobia. _Spite._ Fawn raises two fingers to the camera in greeting then lets the mug drop. It clatters hard onto the shelf, the handle chipping, the loose pieces scattering onto the floor. “Don’t like coffee?”

Fawn nearly jumps out of her skin, spinning around to find a woman waiting just inside the doorway, the sun bright at her back. Fawn settles, the air warping slow around her. The woman steps into the store, her features coming into view. Fawn can see, over the woman’s shoulder, one of those trucks parked a few feet away from the entrance. A man watches them from the passenger’s seat. Fawn swallows hard and straightens her shoulders, turning her attention back to the woman. They are, if Fawn has to guess, the same age. Fawn’s taller, a little more willowy than the petite woman now only a few feet in front of her, but it feels strangely like an echo as they stand opposite each other.

They’ve never met, but Fawn knows her look. All junkies sort of look the same, even when they’re pretty. _Especially_ when they’re pretty and this woman’s scrubbed face and dreamy eyes remind her uncomfortably of her own mother. Fawn tries to hide a grimace. The woman smiles and it’s more lucid than the women who’d walked beside Joseph, but not by much. It’s only when her eyes dart quickly across the store, casing each corner, that Fawn realizes she is watching her own tactics mirrored back to her. Apparently satisfied, the woman settles back into her dreamy smile. “I’m Faith.”

She says it like it should mean something to Fawn and Fawn wracks her brain. Finds nothing. “Are you with the…” She bites back _cult,_ “are you with the Project at Eden’s Gate?”

Her smile broadens. Her teeth are perfectly straight, unnervingly white. “I’m with the Father.” Faith sways a little when she says his name and Fawn notices that she is barefoot, her toes dirty. Her dress is a little dirty too, at its lacy hem like she’s been kneeling on the dirt. It’s an odd dress. Caught somewhere between demure and racy. The embroidered flowers dip low on her chest, revealing the soft alabaster tops of her breasts.

Fawn hasn’t heard of Faith at all, but now the word’s strange capitalization in both the book and on the billboards starts to mean something. And that realization sparks more questions and Fawn is busy trying to untangle what that all might mean when Faith reaches up to tuck a strand of Fawn’s hair behind her ear. “I haven’t seen you before.”

Fawn swallows hard, takes a single step back, and tries her best to smile. “I just moved here.” She holds her hand out. “Fawn.”

Faith glances down at her outstretched hand but doesn't take it. Fawn pulls her hand back, holding it gently against her chest, suddenly overwhelmed. “You’re pretty.” Fawn hears the threat in her voice, the slight twinge of _something_ in the way she says it.

She flounders. While she researched her last article, she’d relished compliments like that because they meant she was getting closer to her goal. Big, powerful men love to dispense compliments, love to put _little girls_ like her in their places. Their underestimation of her the root of her power, her foot in the door. But here, with this woman, here in the middle of the wilderness, Fawn isn’t sure what it means. “Oh,” she manages, “thank you.”

Faith smiles, fingers skimming the groove on the mug’s handle where Fawn chipped it. “Do you like it here?”  
Fawn fights the urge to back away. “Yeah, it’s…beautiful.”

Faith looks up at her, laughs quietly. “It is, isn’t it?” She cocks her head. “Have you been to a service?”

“For Eden’s Gate?” She nods, her eyes that swirling absence that makes Fawn feel so young and so frightened. She swallows the feeling, hopes that Faith can’t see right through her. “No, I haven’t.”

“There’s one this Sunday. 10am. At the little church along the Henbane. Hard to miss.” She reaches out and tucks Fawn’s hair behind her other ear. “You should come.”

The sun is high in the sky now, beating down on her back as Fawn jiggles her keys in her station wagon's fussy lock. Her hands are trembling, just a little. She frowns, balling her hands into angry fists. “Pull yourself together,” she hisses. A breeze rolls along the road, picking up the scent of pine and a fainter, almost noxious, scent of flowers. She isn’t sure she’s ever smelled a flower like that. Fawn glances up. There’s a billboard right by where she’s parked that she missed coming it. Its background is a gunmetal grey. _Just say yes_ written in bold, blue print. The same color as John Seed’s eyes from that photo, the same color they’d been that night when he’d picked her up from the side of the road. She shakes the thought from her head. The sign is hokey, really. Reminds her of salesmen, of multi-level marketing schemes. _Just say yes._ She feels a little dizzy and slides hurriedly into her car, cracking open one of the last of Holly Pepper’s stale cokes. She sips it, watching as Faith wanders slowly out of the shop. She meanders toward the waiting truck, bending down to press her face gently to some of the flowers sprouting from the planters that line the drive. One of the men, this one with his head shaved, reaches for her, helps her up into the passenger’s side. He has a strange, shambling walk. Fawn finishes the coke and leans her head back against the seat. She closes her eyes. Her heart won’t stop pounding.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading <3.


	11. June 20th, 2019

She understands now. At least a little. Because if his writing is limp and meandering, Joseph’s words are incisive even as they drip with the sweet honey of his Southern birth. He has a presence. And it fills the whole church. Oscillating between threatening and fatherly, sometimes, somehow, both at the same time. Patriarchal in the most sexual, abrasive sense of the word. Fawn gets the appeal. And she understands, sitting here among the pews, the smell of raw wood and boot leather all around her, how easily she could get caught up in it. Everyone else inside the narrow church certainly seems to be.

Not everyone in the pews is dressed like the ones she’s seen so often in those trucks. Not even most of them. Most of them, in fact, don’t look all that different from her. She even spots a couple Spread Eagle regulars sitting opposite the aisle from her in the back pews. But regardless of how they’re dressed, they are all looking up at Joseph in a rapt attention that has started to edge menacingly toward devotion. Fawn can’t help but squirm. Her particular flavor of inattention branding her a clear outsider. More than once, a parishioner will glance over at her, holding Fawn’s gaze just a little too long, apparently immune to the polite smile she’s perfected since childhood. And in the little church’s low light, something is buzzing.

Fawn woke to clouds, a smooth, feather grey sky that threatened rain, but never followed through. And it’s left the inside of the chapel muted, almost murky. There is something simmering under the surface here, barely hidden. A tense, taut energy that makes Fawn sure that if Joseph told them to jump, they would leap from their seats. 

But the harshest energy in the room isn’t coming from the parishioners. It’s coming from John. She’d seen him immediately as she’d filed inside for the service. He was hard to miss, leaning jauntily against the far wall, his shirt unbuttoned lower than she’d seen it before. But when she walked in, he’d gone rigid, hands flexing, grasping at nothing. She’d waved two loose fingers at him and, regaining his composure, he’d raised both eyebrows, lips curled into a half-smile. She’d tried not to admit how sinister that smile was, how disarming. And he hasn’t moved from that spot, hasn’t taken her eyes off her either. She’s, mostly, returned the favor. Unable to pull her eyes from him. He has a magnetism much sharper than his brother’s, a ferocity that reminds her uncomfortably of the night she’d cum on her own fingers, thinking of him. Especially like this, lurking in the shadows, surveying Joseph’s flock like a predator, all barely contained violence. He, in so many ways, eludes her. Hard to tamp down. She can’t even begin to figure out how she’d write him in the piece. Today, in the half-darkness of the chapel, he looks nothing like that man who picked her up off the side of the road a few nights before. Much more like the man who threatened Mary May in the Spread Eagle and yet he is still the most comforting thing in the room, the most familiar. The _only_ familiar thing, really, especially now that Joseph’s sermon has reached its crescendo. Joseph’s unbuttoned his faded, southwestern shirt, letting it hang around his elbows, exposing his heavily inked chest. Fawn makes note of the crown, of the _lust_ carved just above where his dark pubic hair starts to trail down. Tries to, at least, but the energy in the room is boiling now, the parishioners beside her muttering, all in the same tempo. The chapel is suddenly hot, the air thick. Joseph’s chest is glistening, covered in a thin sheen of sweat. Fawn fidgets in her seat. It’s becoming hard to sit still, hard to focus. He is talking, in that rhythmic twang, about the end of the world. About locusts and fire, about screaming death, about enemies. All around them. Fawn fidgets again. The others in the pews are swaying to his words, swaying in time to a rhythm she can’t hear and that dread she’s been feeling since she arrived nearly overtakes her, rushing up inside of her so intensely that she feels, for the first time in, Christ, years, like she might start to cry. She and John lock eyes. He pushes off from the back wall, then nods, his gaze holding hers. Fawn exhales, her muscles unclenching, feeling decidedly less unmoored. And then that dread rolls over her again, because she is in the belly of the beast and John Seed is not her ally here.

Joseph’s voice is getting louder, a steady rumble that reverberates through the narrow, little chapel. And when it reaches its crescendo, the woman in the pew in front of her shudders so violently that Fawn sits up higher to get a better look. The woman is young, maybe only a year or two younger than Fawn, her blonde hair hanging limp around her shoulders. It looks almost stiff to the touch. She turns slowly, her profile to Fawn, gazing out of the far window. They’re all open, short linen curtains billowing in the breeze. The woman’s eyes are rimmed in red. The skin underneath a dusty, pale pink. Like she hasn’t slept in days, but her expression is serene, her eyes soft and blank. Then, as if on cue, Joseph raises his hands and the heavy clouds part outside, letting light stream into the church. The sunlight bounces from the eaves, the pale flowers hung in bunches from them shimmer. Fawn frowns. She makes a note to come back after the service, to check the outside for something that could have created this optical illusion. The idea that she can yank away the façade soothes her in a way it maybe should not. She settles back into her seat, but when Fawn glances back up at the woman in front of her, she can see now, in the light, that her face is dirty, gritty splotches of mud on her chin and cheeks, like someone dragged her across the ground. Fawn startles at the sight, looks around the pews and finds that there are others with the same limp hair, same dreamy faces. Fawn’s heart starts to pound, she runs her palms on her jeans. She can feel John’s gaze. She can’t bring herself to look.

Joseph is making a beeline for her and she has to school her body to stop herself from making a break for it out into the open field where she’s parked her car. This is, after all, exactly the reason she came here. To scope things out, to, hopefully, speak with Joseph. So when he finally weaves his way through his congregants to find her at the front of the chapel, she gives him her best, least threatening smile. He returns it with a crocodile one of his own. The lazy, wide smile of a man in his own kingdom. Then, before she can stop him, he reaches out, cupping her face with his hands. The touch is brief, but the feeling of his rough, calloused fingers lingers on her skin. Fawn moves to take a step back, then thinks better of it, standing her ground on the dusty, raw wood of the floor. The pale yellow of his sunglasses obscure the color of his eyes, but they have a glassy, almost weepy quality to them that makes her think they might be yellowed anyway. Everything about him sets her teeth on edge. “It is always such a blessing to see a new face in my sermons.”

“She’s a reporter.” John’s voice comes from behind him. He’s followed Joseph down the aisle. He and Fawn lock eyes. Something passes between them. Like a secret.

“A reporter.” Joseph’s voice is flat, all that messianic dreaminess gone in an instant. The collapse of the illusion is jarring. Fawn’s eyes flit back just in time to see him sneer. So brief she barely catches it. She pretends she didn’t and smiles brightly again, holding out her hand.

“Fawn Honeychurch.”

Joseph takes her hand but doesn’t introduce himself. It’s a neat little trick, makes him seem more important than he really is. Though, as Fawn glances around the still packed chapel, he might really _be_ that important out here. His hand is clammy, chilled even in the dense heat of the room and Fawn fights the urge to wipe her palm on her jeans when he releases it. “ _Fawn._ What an evocative name. I think often of deer.” His eyes flit upward, go hazy like he’s lost in a dream. Fawn tries not to roll her eyes. This is all so ridiculous. This whole thing. All of it. She startles at the sound of the door. A man saunters into to chapel, winding through the pews, a gun strapped to his back, and it suddenly feels much, _much_ less ridiculous. “Deer have many advantages.” Her eyes flit back to him. “They’re quick and agile.” He cocks his head, eyes rolling back to look at her full-on, “but so very docile when caught.” He tsks. “Such is nature.” Fawn doesn’t say anything. She wants to tell him that if he’s going to make threats, he should make better ones.. She wants to tell him that he is _terrifying_ her. But instead, she makes the sort of innocently noncommittal noise that had become almost second nature during her last story. And it seems to have no effect at all on Joseph, but when she glances over his shoulder, she can see the tendons in John’s neck pulled taut, jaw so tight she’s worried about his teeth. “So what brings you here?”  
Fawn manages a nonchalant shrug. “Curiosity.”

Joseph smiles. Something inside of her tenses, prepares to run. “And has it been sated?”

“Piqued actually.” His smile grows. Fawn tries not to recoil from it.

She’s fussing with the lock on her station wagon’s door when she hears him call her name. She’d parked out of the way on purpose, figured that a little distance might afford her some protection if…well, she hadn’t really entertained too many ‘ifs’, worried she might talk herself out of coming if she gave herself the chance. John calls her name again. She looks up to see him weaving through a crowd of parishioners, his long stride quickly closing the distance. “Fawn!”

She yanks her car door open, but then pauses, torn again between fleeing and doubling down. He doesn’t give her the chance to decide, taking advantage of her hesitation and putting his hand firmly on her car door. It takes a moment for him to catch his breath, his cheeks flushed like they’d been the first night she’d seen him and then suddenly, like rising into a new skin, he’s all charm again. That sly smile, his wiry body leaning just a little too close to her. She lets him though, suddenly awash in the musky, leather scent of him, in the warmth radiating from his body “How’s your tire?”

She stiffens. Trying to figure out if there’s a threat buried somewhere in that question. “It’s fine.” She swallows hard. “Thank you for your help.”

“Of course.” But John’s distracted now, looking off over the roof of her car. Fawn follows his gaze and finds that he is looking at Joseph. Something passes between the two men before John breaks away, looking back down at her. “I was surprised to see you this morning, here at the service.”

“Faith asked me to come.”

His mouth tightens. “I asked you too.”

“Well, maybe she’s more persuasive,” A muscle twitches in his jaw but then he smiles It’s too big and too bright and Fawn has had enough of this whole production.

Fawn tucks down into her car, tries to shut the door, but John holds it open. “I’m leaving now.” His eyes are pale, cold. He looks down at her, his knuckles white from his grip on her door. “I’m leaving.” She emphasizes each word.

His smile doesn’t reach his eyes. “Of course.” He releases the door, pats the window like the flank of a horse. “Drive safely now.” His smile isn’t forced now, but there’s a violence writ clean across his face. A glee so sadistic it catches her off guard. Her heart stutters and something that isn’t quite fear and isn’t quite longing blooms inside of her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much for reading <3


	12. July 4th, 2019

The fireworks are searing against the dark of that sky. They’ve turned all the lights out in Fall’s End to make the sky even darker. The only light coming from distant headlights curving along the mostly desolate highway and the burning embers of the grill out on the front porch A few sparklers crackle down by the old church, kids laughing and shouting. The next boom of fireworks drowns them out. They’re vivid against the stars, have afterlives, glittering trails of fading light and smoke carving paths back downward toward the spot at the mouth of the town where they’re setting them off.

Fawn’s lips are frozen raw from all the popsicles she’s been eating up here on the Spread Eagle’s roof. She’s worked her way through almost an entire box of the grape flavored ones much to Mary May’s playful chagrin. _Ain’t fair,_ Mary May teased over the lip of her beer, _that you can eat like a raccoon and still have a body like that._ Fawn thinks that funny coming from a girl whose abs are so hard they poke through the thin fabric of her t-shirts. Mary May leans back to fish through the little cooler they hauled up the narrow stairs to the roof, tossing one over to Fawn. She stifles a laugh, nodding at Fawn’s lips. “That’s a good color for you.”   
Fawn laughs her off, shaking her head. She lays back, the worn wood rough against the skin of her bare arms. She picks at some of the peeling green paint with her nails, lifts them in front of her face to examine them. They’re stained purple from the popsicles too and, on instinct, she pops them in her mouth, the sweet sugary artificial grape a little jolt. Fawn has the sudden, bizarre urge to choke herself on them. It slams her out of her thoughts. She pulls her fingers from her mouth, grimacing at them. Been a little while since she’s gotten laid that’s all, too much celibacy is liable to make you go crazy. Fawn reaches for another beer even though she isn’t finished with the one she’s got, tries to pretend that she hadn’t, in that moment, been thinking of John Seed’s fingers in her mouth, trying to remember which deadly sin goes where, which would be the one sitting on her tongue. Dangerous, ragged thinking born of old, long-buried impulses. She doesn’t have time for it.

Fawn takes a long pull of miller light and wonders what John Seed is doing for the fourth of July. What all of them are doing. That is, she tells herself, relevant to her work. For all his rambling, Joseph Seed’s book gives seldom away about the actual beliefs of the group and the single sermon she’d attended hadn’t really cleared all that much up either. Their core, and possibly only tenant, that the world is ending, _soon_. Fawn leans back again, the cool glass of her beer sweating against her palm. She wonders if the cult can hear their fireworks, if it sounds tonight like the world really is ending.

Another round of fireworks pop off, the scent of gunpowder wafting through the air. The little crowd gathered in camping chairs on the main street oohs and aaahs and Fawn hears the sizzle of Casey putting another round of burgers on the grill, smells the char of meat. Her own plate sits half-eaten next to her. Macaroni salad flecked with peas, the sweetest, freshest blueberry pie she’s ever tasted. Burgers fresh off the grill and potato salad with actual potato chips in it. She’s not sure she’s ever eaten this well, not sure she’s ever eaten out on a rooftop like this, watching the sun spread like a broken yolk over the mountaintops, nowhere to go, nothing to do.

“You’re not so bad you know.” Mary May takes a long pull of beer.

Fawn laughs, a little incredulous. “Um, thank you?”

She winks. “You know, for a big city reporter.” Mary May has a soft sort of secret smile. She doesn’t use it much, Fawn’s noticed that in the month or so she’s spent haunting the Spread Eagle and so it feels particularly special that Fawn’s sitting in the light of it now. “What do they do in the city for the fourth?”

Fawn winces. She spent her last fourth of July puking Sangria in the corner of her colleague’s apartment building roof as weak fireworks popped off miles away in Manhattan. She shakes her head. “Nothing really.” She takes another sip of beer. “Nothing as nice as this.”

Mary May leans back too, exhaling loudly. “Got a lot of memories on the fourth.”

Another pop of fireworks. These golden, crackling like pop rocks before they fall like a curtain back to earth. “Oh yeah?”

“Used to do this with my dad. It was kinda…his thing. I guess. Used to cook out for the whole town. He even rented a cotton candy machine one year.” Mary May smiles softly to herself. “Kids loved it but I was picking spun sugar out of the lawn for weeks. Still find a couple rock hard pieces every so often. ”

Fawn laughs. “No shit?”

“Yep, my dad and brother and I used to really do it up.” Mary May glances over. “It’s a pretty big deal out here.” She nods toward the blinking American flag, “as I’m sure you can imagine. You gotta lotta Fourth of July memories? As a kid I mean.”

“Um…” Fawn flinches, the sudden memory of a frog exploding on concrete washing over her, the smell of its guts mixing with the tang of the firecrackers. Green and red and green and red and then the feeling of a hand hard on her neck, yanking her back, the echoing laughter of boys and, in the distance, the laughter of men. “Not really.”

Mary May glances over. “You didn’t do stuff with your parents?”

Fawn takes a stalling sip of beer. “My dad wasn’t really in the picture and my mom…she uh…she was…busy a lot..”

Mary May doesn’t skip a beat. None of that protracted apologetic weirdness her friends in Nw York would put on whenever she got close enough to tell them that her family was _less than ideal._ A lot of them still had married parents. Normal houses where they’d go for the holidays, complaining over text about pushy aunts and inconsiderate fathers. Fawn would read them all from her spot on the couch alone in her apartment, joint in one hand, tv playing infomercials in front of her.

But Mary May just shrugs. “I get it. Sorta. My mom was a non-fucking-entity. Skipped out when I was a kid. Big drinker.”

“Oh shit.”

“Yeah, not all that uncommon around here.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah.” Mary May sits up a little and turns to her. “You used past tense.”

“What?”

“You used past tense. To talk about your mom.”

Fawn sits a little up too. “Oh, yeah, I guess I did. Um, my mom died when I was five, so…”

”Oh shit.”

“Yeah.”

“How?”

Fawn swallows hard. “Um.” She remembers the cold harness of her mother’s skin, the sharp smell of vomit half dried on the carpet, her hair tangled in the shag. Her throat rattled for a long time after her heart stopped and Fawn remembers curling up against her chest, the vibrations from under her skin a strange, solitary comfort. That burnt sugar smell settling over everything. Fawn shakes her head, takes another sip of beer. “Cancer.”

“Fuck.”

“Yeah. That shit’ll fuck you up.”

Mary May holds up her beer in a toast. “To death.”

Fawn laughs. It’s a relief really, to be this nonchalant. They clink bottles. “To death.”

Fawn settles back against the roof and takes a sip of beer. “Where is the rest of your family anyway? You talk about them all the time, but I don’t think I’ve ever met them.”

“My brother joined the cult.” Fawn stills. The air around them had been so comfortable just a moment ago sharpens. She remembers what Mary May had said one of their first nights in the car, about not knowing if he still fishes. She hadn’t put two and two together. “Maybe a year ago. Maybe two. Time’s been funny since they showed up.” She glances over at Mary May. Her face has the same placid expression it always does, but Fawn can see that her eyes are churning, her mouth tight. “My pop killed himself over it.”

Fawn’s mouth feels a little dry. “Holy shit.”

The finale lights up the whole town. Mary May’s face is lit blue, red, gold. Fawn can tell by the way Mary May’s tensed her shoulders, that the conversation is over, so she tries to relax back against the roof. But it’s hard to. She finds her fingers trembling around her beer. Her thoughts are all knotted together. John Seed’s fingers and the beads of sweat on Joseph Seed’s brow. Those long white trumpeted flowers shimmering in the breeze and the blinking neon of the Spread Eagle’s sign. The dirty soles of Faith’s feet and Mary May’s painted nails. Fawn presses her beer to one temple and closes her eyes. She takes a long breath.

“They’re everywhere you know.” Mary May says between booms. 

Fawn opens one eye to look at her. She doesn’t ask who. Mary May only uses ‘they’ this way. “Yeah?”

“Yep.” She nods over to her left and Fawn sits up to get a look at where she’s pointed. Eden’s Gate trucks, about half a dozen, have parked along the road at the entrance of town. Fawn stiffens, narrowing her eyes to try and see a little better in the dark.. The people inside them have piled out, eyes trained toward the sky. A few are sitting in the beds of the trucks, leaning back to get a better view of the fireworks. They’re in normal clothes and Fawn doesn’t spot any weapons. The only indication that they’re peggies at all the trucks at their backs. “It was fine when they were strangers.” Mary May’s nose twitches. “Now you look over and you see the kid you went to high school with, the old lady who used to mind ya when your dad was working. They’ve got the same faces, the same voices, but…” she shakes her head, “I don’t know, something different in their heads now.”

Fawn can feel the ripples in the crowd, can see the way the people who’ve gathered out in front of the Spread Eagle are trying a little too hard to pretend those trucks aren’t there. “How many?”

“Too many.” Another loud boom. Red, white, and blue shivers against the dark sky, the air thick again with the smell of gunpowder.

When the fireworks are over, Fawn flips open her phone. She’s expecting, well hoping really, to get an email from the affiliate Adam put her in touch with in Atlanta. She’s on the scent of a rumor she’d picked up hanging out outside the tackle shop. Something about John Seed’s mysterious law firm, how they’d managed to buy out a whole small town on the outskirts of Athens, not at all unlike, if you hear the way the locals tell it, what he did out here with the ranchland. But there’s, predictably, no service, the Spread Eagle’s wifi just a single, lone arch. She probably couldn’t even send a text. Fawn sighs and tucks her phone back into the pocket of her shorts. A few of the families are packing up now, piling their coolers and camping chairs into the beds of their trucks. The general store has its door open and the soft twang of country music wafts out into the night. The cultists are long gone, left before the finale even wrapped up. But Fawn can feel the residue they’ve left behind, the tension in everybody’s shoulders. Fawn doesn’t want to look at them anymore, looks instead up at the night sky, livid with stars, streaked with the smoke from the fireworks. She shuts her eyes, lets herself feel small here in the vast wilderness. Everything she’s ever known feels far, far away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much for reading <3\. I promise we're getting to the more John-heavy chapters soon.


	13. July 12th, 2019

The tomatoes were Mary May’s idea. Sort of. Fawn had been drawn to the green darkness of their leaves. Had crouched down and run her fingers along the grooves in them, their herbaceous, faintly sweet smell wafting up when Fawn pinched their edges.

 _Get them,_ Mary May’d said, shrugging in that way Fawn notices she always does when something excites her and she doesn’t want to show it, _why not?_

They’d smoke a joint out on Mary May’s roof. She’d closed the Spread Eagle up early, offered no explanation as she’d shooed out her patrons then nodded almost sternly at Fawn. They’d climbed the roof together in silence. Fawn had sat, passing the joint back and forth, wondering why all her years of training as a journalist had become functionally useless out here. Why she couldn’t turn to Mary May and ask her what the fuck was up with her. Why she’d seemed so distant, so cagey these past few days, ever since the fireworks.

And if she couldn’t do that as a journalist, why was she having so much fucking trouble trying to do it as a friend? And she’d been about to when Mary May sat up, ashing the joint, and told her there was a rummage sale a street over. That they should check it out.

Thus, the tomatoes. Thus, ending up on her knees in the middle of one of northern Montana’s rare sweltering days, wrist deep in dirt in her backyard, trying to figure out if she can just intuit how far apart tomato plants are supposed to be from each other. Fawn sits back on her haunches, wipes some sweat from her brow. There’s no central air in her little house, so she’s thrown all the windows open, the buzzing from the couple box fans she’d dug out of the crawlspace an ambient hum in the background.

The whole exercise feels a little…useless. She’s probably not going to eat the tomatoes. Fawn would be the first to admit she eats like a raccoon, a habit picked up from a lifetime in the system. And, honestly, she’s probably going to kill them before they even have a chance to flower. Especially with how little it seems to rain up here. But she needs to do something. Because all she’s really been doing lately is spinning her wheels. She finally got her internet up, but it’s so slow it’s practically useless. So she’s taken to using her landline. Trying to ident people in her dossier, cross-reference their movements, get a little more information about the Seed brothers, about Faith. But that hasn’t been any more fruitful. No one seems to want to talk. At all. People seem less interested in talking about the Seeds than any other story she’s ever done. And her last one was on an international child sex ring for fuck’s sake.

Fawn drops the trowel she’d borrowed from Casey into the dirt and leans forward, resting her head in her palms. She takes a long, deep breath. The air smells like spruce, like the dying embers of a campfire. It makes her feel melancholy. Heavy. Like when she goes back to New York she’ll have nothing to show for her time here. That she’ll return just as ragged as she left. Maybe even worse if all these fitful nights start to catch up with her.

And it’s here, crouched down in an old plot of soil that she feels it. Just a change in the air, like a storm rolling in. She goes still, lifting her head just a little from her hands, listening. A twig cracks and she sits bolt upright to find him standing in the middle of her drying laundry, sheets billowing around him like wings. John Seed. Fawn drops her hands onto her thighs, tries not to let the way the air has stilled around them unnerve her. He smiles, leaning against one of the wooden poles holding up the clothesline. His shirt is a pale, almost turquoise blue today. Unbuttoned just a little further down, revealing more of the word scrawled across his chest, though Fawn still can’t make it out. He’s still in the same vest she’d seen him wear at the service, but it’s unbuttoned, hanging a little loosely around his chest. There’s something about it that uncoils an almost feral desire in Fawn. She quickly shakes it off as he begins his approach.

His cowboy boots are scuffed now, a dark coppery stain on the toes of one. He smiles. That bright, sinister smile. So different than the one she’d seen in his photograph in the dossier. As he gets closer, she can see that his eyes are pale today, almost icy, like the color’s been drained clean out of them. “Beautiful day, isn’t it?” He holds up his hands like preacher, like he can take the whole sky between his fingers. A breeze rolls through the trees, brushing her laundry softly to the side. Her sheets hide him, then reveal him, closer now than he was before.

Fawn stands, brushing dirt from her hands onto her soil. He’s striking with the sun at his back and she remembers the way he’s smelled like leather, like cologne, the way it had unearthed longing inside of her like she hadn’t felt in so long. She pushes it all down, stands a little taller, chin up. “What are you doing here?”

He doesn’t answer her, just closes more of the distance between them, stopping only when he reaches the last clothesline. The one where she’s hung her underwear. He looks at them, then at her, one side of his mouth pulling up into a smirk. “Provocative. Just hanging out here in the open.” He reaches up and closes his fingers around a peachy lace thong. His thumb runs along the center of it and a shiver rolls through Fawn. It’s hard to tell if she’s afraid or aroused, the two warring inside of her. Both of them riling her up. Shame, that’s what she’s feeling. Shame at her fear, at her desire. Her thoughts spin. Trying to figure out what is happening, what has just happened. He glances back over at her. “ _Sinful._ ”

“This is private property.”

He cocks his head, like he’s considering it, then brushes her off, glancing around the narrow yard. “So, you live in Holly’s old place? Funny little coincidence.”

Her eyes never leave him. She fights the urge to take a step back as he takes one forward. “You know Holly?”

He flashes a menacing smile, revealing his straight, almost too white teeth. “Very well.” John’s eyes rake down her body then back up to meet her eyes, his own burning. “She’s with the father now.” A chill rushes up Fawn’s spine, but she finds enough of her footing to make a mental note to dig through those letters, take a closer look at the crawl space. John holds the thong a little higher, lets it catch the light. He isn’t looking at her, just at her underwear, but she can tell that all his attention is directed toward her. “So, food deserts, hmm?” She reaches angrily up for her panties, but he holds it just out of reach, looking at her finally now in the eyes, delight plain on his face. He lowers his hand, thumb still running over the center of them. “Not a very interesting story for a New York Times reporter of your caliber.”

Fawn wavers. Adam had, of course, been right. Even a cursory google search would pull up her previous stories and dread settles tightly in her chest. The awful feeling of being exposed holding her brain suddenly hostage. But then her training kicks in. She barely blinks. “The New York Times is interested in all manner of topics.”

That earns her a deep-throated laugh. “So it is. Well,” he tosses her underwear into the air, the lace glinting against the clear, blue sky, then quickly catches it before she can reach out and grab it, “I have nothing to say about food deserts, so I suppose my offer of an interview won’t interest you in the slightest.” She freezes and he must notice because his grin widens. “Or perhaps the sin of deceit has overtaken you.”

Fawn recovers quickly, scowling at him. “That’s not one of the seven deadly sins.”

He cocks his head, eyes so sharp and piercing they bore a hole straight through her. His voice just a breathy whisper. “No, but it is a sin.”

Fanw gulps and this time she does take a step back. He’s crowding her. “What are the terms of your interview?”

He smiles, looking back at her panties. “What’s the article about?”

Fawn doesn’t miss a beat. “Religious freedom in America.”

He cocks his head, eyes sliding back to look at her. “Is that true?”

“True enough.”

He chuckles, folding her underwear in his fist then gingerly placing it in her palm. “I’ll be in touch to set something up.” She watches him go, watches as he brushes past her drying sheets, fingers lingering on the edges. Her heart is pounding at the base of her throat. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a short little update.  
> The next few will be much longer (and perhaps a little smuttier ;) ) . Thanks for reading <3


	14. July 15th, 2019*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

It feels, as his truck slows to a stop in front of her, like whatever they had started that sweltering afternoon in her backyard, is about to be finished. Time slows around her. Every cell in her body is humming.

The sky has threatened rain all day. Heavy, gray clouds hanging low across the distant peaks, but now that electricity is churning. The clouds thinning out, long and whispy, revealing the starry night sky. The first long crack of thunder rolls across the valley as he rolls down his window. Lightning splits the sky, revealing the handsome lines of his face. It feels like an echo of another night and Fawn feels, suddenly, like she might be dreaming. A smile curves up one side of his mouth and when he reaches across the truck to open the passenger door, she knows, just by the way her body tenses, that she is, in fact, wide awake. “My, my. Here we are again.” Fawn wavers on the shoulder of the road, the hem of her dress swishing around her bare thighs as the coming storm kicks up strange, swirling breezes. They kiss along her legs. “Can I offer you a ride?”

It’s the alcohol probably. She’s had more than enough of that. Closed out the Spread Eagle with Mary May, cleaned out one of the taps. Staci had been there too, talking boisterously across the bar from Fawn, doing a pretty blatant job of ignoring her. But he’d followed her outside, tossing the keys to his cruiser up into the cool night air and catching them. Over and over. Like a dog chases a ball. _I can get ya home,_ he’d said. More of a statement than a question. So self-assured that her refusal stilled his hand, his keys landing on the Spread Eagle’s dusty front porch. _Ya sure,_ he’d asked, bending down to retrieve them. And she had been. Maybe a little from spite, but mostly because men who ask questions they’ve already answered tend to have a hard time with no.

So, it’s funny then, that she’s already got her hand on the open door of John Seed’s truck. That she wouldn’t get into a car with a cop, but this man? This man doesn’t even have to ask her twice. Maybe this is the part of herself she inherited from her mother.

She tells herself, as she shuts that door, the truck rumbling back to life, that this is her x factor. Her star quality. Reporters take risks. She more than most. This is another. A calculated risk. A way to get things moving on a story that has become both a dead end and a deep well. But the way she rakes her eyes up John’s body as he watches her slide into her seat makes it hard to stick to that particular story. He shifts the truck into gear, headlights cutting a long crystalline line through the deepening darkness. She leans back against the seat.

The first time she’d ridden in his truck there had been a faint metallic smell, earthy and bright, but it’s gone now, replaced with the bite of bleach. Strange even if she’s a little too overstimulated to try and pinpoint exactly why. But soon John cracks all the windows and the smell dissipates, chased out by the clean, cedar-y air along the highway. John’s got that that station on the radio again. The one with the songs that seem almost familiar but Fawn’s sure she’s never heard before. It’s on low. So low that it’s just an ambient hum in the background. He turns it even lower before he speaks. “What a little night owl you are, hmmm. Always lurking after dark.”

Fawn brushes some hair off her shoulders. “I do plenty of lurking in the daytime.”

John chuckles. “Apparently so.” He glances over at her, the metal earrings he wears catching in the muted light of the cab. “Hard to miss you.”

The sense of longing that sprang up inside of her as soon as he opened the truck’s door starts to simmer. She crosses her arms over her chest and leans back a little more in the seat, giving John a long once over. He’s not wearing the vest today, just a navy button-down shirt, the same pair of well-fitted jeans. His fingers curl around the steering wheel and Fawn traces the dark ink of his tattoos as he moves. Maybe it’s the alcohol or maybe it’s how warm the truck is, how softly it’s rocking as they drive down the highway, but she feels suddenly, unbearably starved for touch. And there’s an assuredness wafting off him, a steadiness that has been calling to her since maybe the first time she ever laid eyes on him. She can’t help it. Her body isn’t consulting her brain. She reaches for him.

The air stills around them when she touches her fingers to his cheek. He has, at first, no reaction. Then he reaches up and presses her hand to the skin of his cheek, squeezing just a little too tightly. His eyes slide over to look at her and she can feel his jaw tightening under her touch. In the dark, she can’t see the color of his eyes.

With one hand on the wheel, John pulls off onto the side of the road, killing the engine. He releases her hand but she doesn’t move it, all the muscles in her body tense like prey. A beat of silence passes between them, air heavy, then John’s on her like a predator. He crawls over the truck’s center console, pushing her roughly back against the passenger door, the thin fabric of her dress already bunched up around her hips. Their kiss is bruising. Sloppy, wet. Fleeting. Because he soon turns his attention to her neck, running his teeth down the column of her throat. Fawn gasps, arching up to meet him, hands tight on his shoulders. There is a brief moment, as she spreads her legs to let him fit between them, when she thinks that this might be the stupidest thing she’s done yet. The most reckless. The thought slips easily away when John kisses the hollow of her throat. It spikes again when he replaces his lips with his hand, palm across her neck, not tightening but holding her firmly against the half-up window as his other hunts across her shoulders, brushing the straps of her dress down to expose her breasts. But the cool night air coming in from the open windows makes it hard to focus on anything but his touch. He rocks back, eyes blazing. His breathing’s a little more labored now, mouth tight as he rakes his gaze down her bare chest. Then he smiles, an almost predatory look that has Fawn both pressing harder away from him and canting her hips up toward him. He reaches for her, rolling one nipple between his thumb and finger, pinching. Fawn gasps, the sound coming out breathy and disjointed. His jaw’s a little slack, then that grin returns and he cups the full weight of her breast in his palm. “What a delicate little thing you are.” He pinches again. She moans. The hand he still has on her throat tightens, almost imperceptibly. John leans down to run his tongue between her breasts. “There’s nothing to you.” He takes one nipple between his lips, threatens it with his teeth. The thrill of it races up her spine, body taut to his touch. John releases her throat, trails that hand down her body, each muscle tensing as his fingers skim over them. He kisses beneath her jaw, nips at the skin as he slides her panties to one side. His fingers twitch when they find her.

He slips a finger inside, then another, crooks them up, nipping again at the skin of her jaw. “Jesus Christ, John.”

He growls into the hollow of her throat, hand returning to her throat, pressing her again back up against the door. “ _Yes_ ,” he moans when her hips churn against his hand, “I knew you’d be debauched from the very first moment I saw you. _Dripping wet._ And I’ve barely touched you.” He picks up the pace, fucking her hard on his fingers. Fawn matches him, rocking her hips toward him, soft sighs pouring out of her mouth. “I knew I would find your sin here.” His thumb brushes roughly against her clit, grinding into it, yanking sensation out of her. “ _Lust.._ ” He growls the word into her ear. It echoes inside of her, folds into meaning, into something that feels palpable, tangible. She digs her nails into his shoulders. He hisses at the pain but it seems to spur him onward. He fucks her harder on his fingers, her back beating against the door with each thrust of his hand. A few strands of hair have come loose from his slickback, dangling in front of his forehead. She reaches for them but misses her mark, rocked back again by another rough thrust, her fingers landing instead on his chest, His skin is warm, vital. She inches them downward. He’s crowding her, whispering filth in her ear, fingers pumping hard inside of her. Pleasure bears down on her, her fingers fumbling along the muscles of his chest, and then she finds it. The scar. It’s raised like brail and she follows it. There’s a fear in her, rising up alongside all the other feelings he’s coaxing out. It makes her feel young. And lonely. Makes her reach for him, pull him closer, return to the scar only after their bodies are nearly flush. His lips brush across her collarbone. She traces the word. Once, then again. He moans at the feeling, his thumb going gentle, his mouth soft on her skin. She tries to make sense of it. Again and again, her fingers roll over the letters until she feels her way to the word. _Sloth._ And then, deeper, an angry clean line through it. And another, this one scabbed over, the fresh stick of blood on her fingertips when she rubs too hard, John hissing at the fresh pain. It unleashes something in him, has him pushing her harder against the door, fucking her harder on his hand. Fawn cums with her fingers splayed across the word, cums so loud and ragged that he holds her hips, growls into her throat.

But John doesn’t let up, he doesn’t relent. He fucks her even when she twitches at the touch and when Fawn reaches down again, she finds that he’s freed himself from his jeans, cock hard and warm against her palm. She can’t see him in the darkness but she can feel his girth, feel the pulse of his heart through his cock. She yelps when he quirks his fingers up, an aftershock rolling through her and finally it’s too much. Fawn squirms away, catching his hands in her own. “Fucking God, John.” He laughs, an almost bright sound. “How on earth…how the fuck…how are you so good at that?”

His chuckle is deeper now, vibrates through her chest, his mouth pressed to her sternum. “Practice.” He mouths at her nipples, hand sliding up to cup her face. When he looks up at her, his eyes are the endless blue of tidepools, of the Montana sky. He kisses her softly on the lips. “I have sins of my own,” John whispers it like a secret into her mouth and then, without a word, both their hands wrap around his cock, his over hers. She can’t close her fingers around the full width of him, but he can and in the darkness it’s hard to tell where her skin ends and his begins. And maybe that’s why, as she glides their hands down the full length of him, she can feel his orgasm build, feel it shudder through him long before he cums hot against her thigh.

He falls into her when he finally does, panting against her chest, hands holding tight to her wrists. Fawns lays back, her neck against the half-open window. The rain has stopped, the air clear and dry now as it wafts in through the truck’s open window. A lonely cricket sings through the darkness. A breeze tousles what hair’s fallen out over the side of the truck. Her breath feels expansive as she exhales. She pries one hand from him and he lets her, lets her smooth it over his hair. It’s a little stiff with gel, but still soft, thick. And in that moment, suspended in the darkness all around them, he seems almost docile. Almost safe. He doesn’t let it linger, grunts as he pushes himself off of her, ducking a little so he can pull his jeans back up over his hips. He glances at her as he straightens his belt and Fawn finds that she can’t read the look on his face. He schools it back into a grin, eyes trailing down between her legs. Fawn closes them, his cum sticky between them. She wipes at it with her palm, a livid blush scattering across her cheeks. John starts the truck, fiddles with the radio. “Should I take you home?” There’s an odd lilt to his voice. Something she can’t quite place.

Fawn laughs, lowering her legs to look over at him. “Where else would you take me?” His eyes glitter and Fawn feels again small as prey. Suddenly the idea of being alone with him for even another second fills her with fear. A fear she probably should have been feeling from the very beginning. Fawn brushes the straps of her dress back up over her shoulders, frowning. “Just take me back to the Spread Eagle.”

Something dark passes over his eyes but it’s fleeting, so quick she almost misses it. He chuckles, arranging himself back behind the steering wheel. “So that’s where you’ve been, hmmm?” She curses internally, still not sure what it is about this nowhere fucking place that has her still so off her game. He sounds different when he speaks again. Less controlled than he had before, menace simmering under a teasing façade. “So, you’ll let me fuck you with my fingers, but you won’t let me take you home?” Fawn pauses, glancing over at him. It’s a little shocking, that vulgarity. Even knuckle-deep inside of her, his voice had been measured, the steady, lilting tone of a preacher. Fawn just shrugs, trying not to let him see that she’s a little rattled. “How well do you think you can hide in a place like this?”

She whirls around to look at him full-on. He’s grinning, eyes a little teasing. Fawn swallows hard, but lets her voice stay even. “You know, you were doing alright before that line.”

He chuckles, the truck roaring to life as he turns the key. “Ah, well. Duly noted. To the Spread Eagle then. Where I’m sure you’ll tell Mary May all about your night.” She glares at him. “Or maybe you won’t.”

They don’t say much to each other on the short ride over. And by the time they pull up to the bar, Fawn is practically squirming in her seat. This late, the town is just another spot of darkness in the valley. Only a few windows have light, back along that little road where she’d bought those tomatoes.

John parks a little bit down and away from the bar’s front door which Fawn appreciates. He’s right, she’s really not looking to explain whatever the fuck has just happened in this truck to her only contact in Hope County. Her only friend, she corrects. Fawn starts to unbuckle her seatbelt, going still when she catches movement in her peripheries. John hesitates, hand hanging in the space between them, then takes hold of a strand of her hair. He curls it around one knuckle, holding it, examining it, then letting it fall limp. “Don’t do that again.”

“Excuse me?’

“Go wandering at night. Alone. Don’t do it again.” His eyes are steely, boring into her. “Dangerous out here. Never know what you’ll run into.” Fawn scoffs. She unbuckles herself and slips out of the car. “Fawn.” She glances over her shoulder at him. His eyes are glittering again, lips drawn up into an almost sinister smile. Whatever seriousness had just passed over him is gone. “Will that do for your interview then?” Fawn slams the door shut.

Fawn doesn’t really expect Mary May to answer but she knocks anyway. Her bedroom’s way on the other side of the bar from the door, up a narrow staircase in a sort of cozy little half attic. She pounds on it a couple more times before admitting defeat, rocking back on her heels, hands on her hips. John, at least, has had the decency to drive away. His cum is still sticky on her thighs and Fawn can’t remember if she’s ever had a walk of shame this particular brand of fucked up. A little animal races across the low-hanging awning. Fawn jumps at the noise, then takes a couple steps back, her heels scuffing on the dirt drive, half on/half off the porch. The awning’s low enough that she could probably hoist herself up onto it, scurry onto the roof. An owl calls from a nearby tree, its trill echoing in the quiet night. Fawn glances toward the direction of the sound, at the dark tuft of trees back behind the general store, then back up at the awning. Hell. Why not? Certainly wouldn’t be the dumbest thing she’s done tonight.

Fawn scrapes her knee on a shingle but makes it up without much other trouble. She crawls on her hands and knees across the roof toward the single narrow window at the back. She slows just before she reaches it, looking out toward the mountain looming off in the distance. If she squints, she can see a line of lights snaking up one of them. Maybe they’re skiers? She shakes her head. It’s fucking summer. What an idiotic thought. Fawn shakes it off, rapping at the little window.

Mary May opens it, wiping blearily at her eyes. “Fawn? What the fuck are you doing?”

Fawn hikes her dress a little up, sliding her legs under her. “Coming in.” She glances down at Mary Mae’s cotton shorts to see she’s got a pistol tucked in the waist, freezes, her fingers curled around the windowsill “Do you have a fucking gun?”

Mary May wipes at her eyes, groaning. “This is fucking Montana. You can’t just sneak up on people’s fucking houses and not expect them to be packing heat.”

“Jesus Christ.” Fawn slips down through the window into the room. The carpet’s old, a little worn, the walls just a bare wood paneling. The whole room smells like cedar, like dust, a sharp hint of liquor. It’s cozy, Fawn thinks, ducking a little to get out from under the slanted roof. Cluttered – books and clothes and a few crates of records scattered on the floor. There’s a fine layer of dust on all the surfaces but the motes that drift softly by are almost comforting. Homey.

Mary May grunts as she shoves the rickety window. It creaks shut. She locks it. Checks the lock twice, then rakes her fingers through her hair, sighing, She pulls the gun from the waist of her shorts and sets it on the bedside table. Fawn toes off her sneakers, tries to shake John Seed’s touch from her skin. “Didn’t make it home, huh?”

Fawn laughs, a little nervously. “Yeah, gave up about halfway.”

Mary May snorts. “Told ya.” She stretches her, her shoulders popping. “Well, strip down.”

Fawn blinks at her. “Ha, what?”

“I’m not letting you sleep in my bed in your day clothes.”

Fawn nods toward the door. “Figured I’d sleep on the couch downstairs.”

Mary May laughs. “You don’t want to sleep on that couch, trust me,”

Fawn grimaces. Mary May tosses her a shirt, the fabric soft with age. Fawn holds it out in front of her. A cartoon bear smiles back at her. _Fang Center_ printed in bold letters underneath. “I think I have a magnet for this place on my fridge.”

“Probably. Pretty popular spot.”

“Oh yeah?” Mary May just shrugs, yawning. Fawn pulls her dress off, acutely aware now that John has left marks on her, bruises blooming between her breasts in the shape of his mouth. She pulls the shirt quickly over her head. A truck rumbles past on the street. They both pause, looking out at the window. Guilt rushes up inside of her and she has to bite back the sudden desire to confess what she’s just done. But nothing good would come from that, so Fawn pads over to the free side of the bed and slips under the covers, trying not to feel like she’s let something horrible into her life. Like she’s opened up a door she can’t shut.

Mary May groans as she flops down on her side of the bed. “Hope you don’t snore.” Then she turns around, sniffing. “You smell like a man.”

All the air rushes out of Fawn’s lungs, but she recovers quickly. “You're drunk.” 

Mary May laughs sleepily. “Very. Besides, can’t imagine anybody out here being your type..”

Fawn tries to laugh, then turns her back to Mary May. tucks her hands between her thighs. The skin there is still tacky to the touch. She brushes her fingers across it. Fawn should feel disgusted, shame, but she doesn’t. She feels a frightening, overwhelming desire and has to close her eyes to keep it from overtaking her. Her fingers twitch against her skin. She can almost feel the letters carved into his skin. _Sloth._ More questions than answers now. The sleep that overtakes her is dark and dreamless.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much for reading <3


	15. July 18th, 2019

They’re meeting outside his bunker. Fawn’s letting that sink in a bit as Dutch fastens a heavy lock to the bunker’s storm door. He straightens up and looks over his shoulder, giving the narrow path in front of them a thorough once over. He’s got quick, suspicious eyes behind those wire glasses. He trains them back on her before reaching down for his pack.

It’s a warm day. One of those sunny, beautiful days in Montana where the air is dry, and the temperature is just right. Birds chirp in the trees all around them, a breeze coming in off the river rustles the tall grass on either side of the path. It’s peaceful. Should be, at least, but Fawn’s having a hard time getting out from under the dread that’s been sitting like a stone at the base of her chest. Shame too. Sharp and prickly especially in the morning after she showers, when she stands nude in front of the mirror. The evidence of his touch livid across her breasts, a bruise the round shape of his mouth right above her heart. But Fawn’s sick of fixating, and in dire need of new leads that don’t involve slipping back into John Seed’s truck so she tries instead to focus all her attention on the bad-tempered old man in front of her. She watches as he wraps a heavy chain around the door’s handles, secures it with two padlocks. Each has a separate key, both hanging from a chain around his neck. She spots the outline of a set of dog tags through the thin fabric of his t-shirt. So, he’s a vet. Vietnam if she had to guess. He’s the right age. Has that certain grizzled something. Dutch rattles the chain, testing its hold, then scowls her. “Consider yourself lucky.” The chain clatters against the storm door when he releases his hold. Dutch groans as he straightens up. “Aint a lot of folks that have seen this bunker.”

Fawn glances over at the river. A fishing boat bobs in the shallow reeds; she can hear the distant buzzing of jet skis. “Don’t worry. There’s no way I’d ever be able to find my way back here.”

He narrows his eyes at her, nostrils twitching. “They tell you I hate reporters?”

“Might have mentioned it, yeah.”

His eyes narrow further. “Well, I fucking _hate_ reporters.”

Fawn feels, maybe for the first time since she set foot in Montana, in her element. That well-practiced calm falling over her again. “Well, I appreciate you talking to me then.” She smiles at his stony expression, hands on her hips. Dutch is only a few inches taller than her, a sturdy but squat man, and Fawn makes a point to look up at him. _We’re on your turf,_ she tells him with her body language, _we’re playing by your rules._ It seems to work a little, her smile. She sees the muscles in his neck soften. 

Dutch scoffs, crouching down to pull a ghillie tarp over the storm doors. “Anybody else talking to you?”

Fawn’s nose twitches. “Not really.”

Dutch raises a questioning eyebrow. “Not even Whitehorse?”

The last time Fawn showed up at the police station, Whitehorse stood with one hand on his ten-gallon hat, the other on his gun. _Run along now,_ he’d said, her anger at his refusal quelled only by the look in his eye. Something a little like pity. Something a lot like fear “Especially not him.”

“Sheriff Whitehorse is a goddamn cunt.” Dutch emphasizes every word. Fawn can’t help herself. She laughs.

Dutch’s cabin is a bit of a hike from the bunker, set up on a bluff spitting distance from a forest service firewatch station that looks like its best days are decades behind it. Fawn can see, as she pauses on the steep, gravel path up to the cabin, just how narrow the island is, just a thin strip of land at the wide confluence of three rivers. The clear water shimmers in the sun, a few boats bobbing around the shoreline. Dutch glances back, making sure she’s still following. Fawn raises a hand, then starts again up the path.

His cabin’s smaller than hers which, to be totally honest, isn’t something she thought was possible. Mary May told her Dutch has lived alone for a long time, but the place looks snug even for one person.

He nods for her to follow him up onto the porch and she does, careful of a top step that looks like the wood’s rotten almost the whole way through. Fawn glances through one of the open front windows and finds an interior sparser than maybe she’s ever seen in a place. Just a futon over on the back wall, a mini-fridge that he seems to be using as a bedside table. She can hear a police scanner going from somewhere she can’t see, hears, just for a moment, the low gruff sound of Staci Pratt’s voice before brushing her hair quickly back behind her ears and turning back to face Dutch.

She can tell he’s trying to figure out what to do with her, smoking through a pack of cigarettes, lighting each with the burning tip of the last, hard gaze never leaving her. The reputation that so precedes him is one he’s filling out now with that look. Mary May offered to go with her, act as a bit of a bridge between the two of them. And as Fawn had gone practically off-roading to get to the only spot he’d been willing to meet, she’d regretted not taking her up on it. But now, on the porch, she’s glad she came alone. Because that gruff harshness reminds her a lot of her favorite foster dad. One of the very last. And she tells him that, because she’s pretty sure it’ll shake up whatever glossy perception he has of her now. And it seems to work. Because his eyes soften and he puts his pack of cigarettes down on the porch’s worn railing. “Ah yeah? Wouldn’t have pegged you for a system kid.”

“Well, I’m not a kid anymore so."

He chuckles. “Yeah, you really fucking are.” He sniffs, eyes appraising her again. “Where ya from?”

“LA.” Dutch whistles. “Chewed me up and spit me out so if you’re worried about whether or not-‘

“I ain’t worried about you. Waste of my fucking time. I’m worried about you shaking up a hornet’s nest and leaving us to deal with the bees.” Fawn opens her mouth to tell him she’s being careful of all that when John’s fingers flash through her mind. Those sins curling up inside of her, curling tight around her neck. Her jaw snaps shut. “If you come at the cult, you best not miss.”

Fawn chuckles. She feels, in this moment, like the person she knows she is. The woman who landed herself a job at the Times. When she speaks, her voice is steady, assured. “I don’t miss.”

Dutch rocks back a little, eyes narrowed. He appraises her for a long time, mouth tight. Then, with a grunt, he heads toward his front door. She can see a muscle jump in his neck. She imagines his body is a tight cord of angry muscle, imagines his heart pounding angrily too in his chest. He nods back at her, then at the open doorway. “Alright kid, we’ll talk.” But before she can take a single step, he whirls around, pointing his finger at her. Fawn rocks back reflexively. “I see my fucking name in the paper in sixth months, I swear to Christ I’ll tan your hide myself.”

The lemonade he pours her he made himself. She can tell from the first sip – sweet, tart, fresh – and it adds another layer to him. Softens him to her the way her revelation probably did the same for him. But even with that gesture of good faith, Dutch is still all business. “So the Peggies, huh?” He sniffs again, hands in his pockets. “Why the fuck would someone like you come all the way out here for them?”

Fawn gives the little cabin another once over. The walls are papered in newsprint, but she’d need a closer look to tell if it’s a utilitarian choice or some kind of sloppy detective work. And Dutch isn’t about to give her the opportunity. “It’s topical.”

"It’s what now?”

“The American people are interested in fringe religious groups like this. Especially out west.”

“Well, I don’t give two shits about the American people.” 

“But you give a shit about the cult.” It isn’t a question. She doesn’t phrase it like one.

Dutch narrows his eyes at her, before settling back up against the far window. “I give a shit about me and mine.”

“And the cult’s infringing on that?”

“This isn’t an interview.” 

Fawn sets her glass of lemonade down by the police scanner. “We’re off the record.”

“Yeah very fucking likely. Forgive me for not taking a word that comes out of your mouth at face value.” His mouth twitches. “Nothing personal. You’re a reporter.”

Fawn laughs. “None taken.” She clears her throat. “This _is_ off the record though. And even if it wasn’t, there’s nothing more sacred in my world than my source’s anonymity.”

“I’m not a source.”

“So you’re not.” A beat of silence. Fawn shoots her shot. “When did you first hear about the Seeds?”

“I told you this isn’t a fucking interview.” His nose twitches again. “But I can give you something.” He tears a piece of paper from a worn, curled spiral notebook, bends down to scrawl a number across the lines. “Donald Pena. 82nd Airborne. Tell him Dutch sent ya. Ask him about Jacob.”

Fawn takes the paper quickly from his hand, closes her fist around it, like he might try to rip it back. “Jacob Seed?” Dutch doesn’t answer, just fixes her with a heavy look. Fawn folds the paper once, then twice, before tucking it into the pocket of her shorts. “Thank you.” The police scanner crackles to life. Both of them jump, their eyes trained to it.

Staci’s voice comes over the line. “I got a 10-65. Report came in from the clinic. Over.” Fawn swallows hard. She doesn’t know much police jargon, but she knows 10-65. It had become a haunting echo during her last story. Missing person. Dutch seems to know that too, sitting down in an old office chair and holding the scanner in his palm.

“Doc call it in?” Whitehorse’s voice sounds a little distorted over the radio.

“Yessir. One of his patients, I think. Heading up now to check it out. Over”

The quiet in the little cabin swells. Dutch sniffs, setting the scanner down. He looks at her, then nods at the door. A clear dismissal. But he clears his throat when she turns to go. “Keep your head on a swivel, kid.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much for reading <3


	16. July 20th, 2019

She didn’t really expect Staci to take her call again. He’d been doing a pretty thorough job of ignoring her whenever they happened to cross paths at the grocery store or the gas station. The looks he’d shoot from across the Spread Eagle sometimes bordered on disdain.

But he picks up on the first ring, voice almost chirpy, like he’s maybe even happy to hear from her. Fawn curls the phone cord around her wrist and tries not to feel…well, she tries not to feel anything and instead asks Staci how he is.

“No complaints,” he says and Fawn can hear the sound of a train horn blaring off in the distance. She imagines he’s out by that big, groaning bridge, feet propped up on his squad car’s open window.

“Are you at work?”

“Yep.”

“Can I ride along?”

She can almost hear the gears turning in his head. “Why would you want to ride along?”

She laughs because there’s something easy about this conversation, something carefree even as they bat back and forth. “You know why.”

He clears his throat. “No, you gotta tell me. Gotta lay it out or I’m saying no.”

Fawn leans forward, resting her head on her elbows. “Do you remember that militia you told me about?”

Staci’s laugh has a warm sound. “Oh no, oh fuck no. I’m already pushing it letting you ride around in my cruiser, there is no way in hell-“

“Then let’s just say I want to see the State Park. You’ve lived around here a long time, right? You can show me around?”

He groans. “Jesus Christ.” She hears a soft thud and imagines he’s rocked back in his seat.

“Staci. Listen, this doesn’t have to be-“

“You at home?” His voice is gruff.

Fawn smiles, tapping her pen against her notepad. She’s drawn a simple map of the Whitetails. Based in part off a couple brochures, the map of the mountain West that came shoved in the glovebox of her station wagon, and the few vague platitudes about the two militias up on the peak Dutch left her with as he walked her back to her car. Jacob’s up there. That’s pretty much all she knows. And she can’t seem to get anywhere with Joseph and really, really does not want to reopen whatever pandora’s box John is. So, Jacob is the logical next step. “Yeah, I’m home.”

Staci sighs, the sound crackling over the phone. “Sit tight.”

It’s a blisteringly hot day. Even up in the mountains. Even in the shade of the trees where Staci’s parked his squad car. They’d gone a little off-roading, heading off the main paved road that curved around the old lumber mill and onto a wide trail, kicking up dirt and pebbles as they drove. He’d stopped just at the end of a bluff overlooking the property, his car shielded from view by a rocky outcropping and smattering of tall pines. Staci shifts a little in his seat and when Fawn glances over, she finds him slipping his police overshirt off. “Hot,” he says by way of explanation, smoothing his hair from his face. The thin fabric of his wifebeater sticks to the skin of his chest, damp with sweat. Staci’s got a tattoo too, now that she can see his exposed sin. The Virgin Mary on his upper right bicep done all in black and white. She’s rimmed in abstract light, drawn like the visage on the front of a prayer candle, hands clasped in solemn prayer, face turned down, eyes full of tears.

Staci’s fit too, which Fawn hadn’t really noticed before. He clearly spends some time in the gym, clearly lifts. Bulkier than John, less agile looking. Fawn wishes she wasn’t drawing comparisons like this; wishes she wasn’t thinking like this at all. So, she turns instead back to the compound in front of them. A maze of ramshackle buildings and hulking machinery. “So, they own this? The cult, I mean?” She’s spotted a flag flying on the far end, that unmistakable symbol right at its center. Staci just shrugs. Fawn rolls her eyes. She really needs to get an in with that secretary at the station, try and rifle through the town’s records, figure out if she can piece together a timeline of the cult’s purchases. Fawn glances back over at him. His jaw is tight, fingers kneading at his chin. She can’t help herself. “I heard you over the police scanner the other day.”   
He snorts, looking sidelong at her. “Miss me that much huh?”

She ignores that. “Who went missing?”

His face falls. Staci takes a deep breath and rakes his fingers again through his hair. “Nobody. They probably just ran off.”

Fawn frowns. “Do a lot of people just run off?”

He scoffs. “Do you really think I can just talk about an open case with you? I am already so thoroughly fucked-“

“So, they didn’t just run off then?” Fawn shifts in the seat, turning to face him full on. “If it’s an open case.” Staci says nothing, just reaches back and pulls a beer from the backseat. “You always drink on the job?”

Staci scoffs. “Only when I’m getting grilled by reporters.”

Fawn chuckles, accepts the beer when he offers it to her. It’s lukewarm. She passes it back with a grimace. “Did you know him? The guy who went missing?”

Staci sniffs, rolls his shoulders. “Yeah.”

“Do you think he would have just run off?”

Staci shifts in his seat again, clearing his throat. “I can’t talk about this, Fawn.”

Silence falls between them. Fawn pulls her knees to her chin, looking out at the trees, the peaks in the distance. From here, she can only see the very tops of the lumber mill’s buildings. She hears Staci take another deep breath and then he’s twisted around again, digging in the backseat. He produces a set of binoculars, tosses them into her lap. “What are these for?”

“I know why you’re here alright, but I’m gonna pretend I don’t. I got some paperwork to do.” He nods toward the lumbermill. “Go on a nature walk or something.”

Mostly what she can see is dogs. Which is, even on its own, odd. Sort of sinister. Fawn doesn’t know a whole lot about the lumber industry but she’s pretty certain a couple dozen German Shepards in cages aren’t standard. Fawn grunts as she moves, trying to get a better vantage. She’s flat on her stomach, propped up on her elbows, binoculars pressed hard to her face. Jesus Christ, the lines of cages never end, crisscrossing their way through the whole property. But even if she were spying on a kennel, it would still be a little ominous. There’s something about the way they’re caged up, the way they’re reacting to it. These dogs are practically frothing at the mouth, nipping at the bars, yowling so loudly Fawn can hear it from here. Their bodies shiver with rage.

Fawn tenses at the sound of a twig breaking. But it’s only Staci. He’s apparently no longer concerned with plausible deniability and crouches down beside her, taking the binoculars for himself. He sets his half-finished beer down in the dirt. “Fucking freaks.”

Fawn sits up, brushing dirt off her t-shirt. “Any idea what they’re doing down there?”

Staci eyes her. “You know I’m not even supposed to be talking to you at all.”

Fawn sits back on her haunches, palms on her thighs. “Oh yeah?”

“Whitehorse is real into that fake news shit.” He looks over at her. “Deep state. Whatever.”

Fawn scoffs. “Christ, are you serious? If I was the agent of some kind of deep state conspiracy do you think I would be begging the sheriff’s deputy to drive me around?”

Staci laughs. It’s a nice laugh. Warm, easy. She smiles at the sound. He’s about to say something when a commotion down at the lumber mill draws both their attention. Staci looks back through the binoculars then passes them to Fawn. A car’s pulled up to the front gate, cultists flanking it on both sides. The back door opens and a man tumbles out, hauled up to his feet by the driver. Fawn sits up higher, her heart reaching an unsteady crescendo in her throat. She can see bruises on the man’s arms and he’s unsteady as he tries to walk. Fawn holds the binoculars to her chest, glancing over at Staci. “Who is that?”

He takes a swig of his beer. “A peggy.”

Fawn looks back through the binoculars. He’s not dressed like the rest of the cultists at the mill. “Are you sure?”

Staci scoffs dismissively. “Of course I’m sure.”

A couple cultists have lifted him up now, supporting him under his arms. He turns to look up at the peaks and Fawn can see blood running down his face from his nose, teeth a pale pink when he grimaces. She turns again to Staci. “He looks hurt.”

Staci glances over at her. “I’m sure he is. They run insane fucking drills out in these woods. Paramilitary shit.”

“Isn’t that like…illegal? I mean, don’t you want to like…regulate that, I don’t know.”

“We try to avoid regulatin’ out here. ‘Specially up in the mountains. People move to places like this to be left well enough alone. And we try to leave ‘em well enough alone.”

Fawn sits back on her hands. The earth’s soft under her fingers, the binoculars discarded in the wild grass between them. “What if someone dies?”

“Then they file a missing person’s report and we deal with it then.” Fawn shoots him a look. Staci stiffens. “I’m not talking anymore about that missing person’s report, Fawn, swear to god, do not even ask me.” He looks back into the binoculars and stiffens again. “Time to go.”

“What? Why?” She scrambles for the binoculars, but he holds them just out of reach.

“Jacob’s here.”

Fawn whirls around just in time to see a dark van roll up through the mill’s gates. “Great.” She reaches again for the binoculars. “This is what I’m here for.”

“No, it’s not. Because we’re going now.” “

Are you fucking kidding me?”

“Because if he finds us up here, he’ll call it in to Whitehorse and complain that we’re trespassing again. And then I’m really SOL.”

“But you’re not! We’re on state land right now, aren’t we? And besides, it’s not like he can fucking prove we weren’t just passing through.” He fixes her with a look. “What?”

”Are you just _trying_ to get me in trouble?”

Fawn rocks back, affronted. “Would you even get in trouble?”

“Uh yeah, I’m drinking on shift and I’ve got the fucking New York Times reporter I’m not supposed to be talking to in the passenger’s seat.” Fawn laughs, the tension suddenly dissipating and Staci, despite himself, laughs too. He gets up with a groan then offers her his hand, pulling her up to stand.

Fawn looks back one last time. A truck is pulling onto the property behind Jacob’s. A truck she recognizes. “Fawn come on.”

She holds a hand up. “One second.” Fawn crouches in the brush, the rock rough against her fingers as she leans over it to get a better look. As if on cue, John swings out of the driver’s side, nodding at the crowd of cultists who’ve gathered.

“Fawn!”

“I know, I know just…another second.” That dread is rising up again, different this time. It was one thing seeing John in that chapel with Joseph. That fits, at least a little, with what she already knows about him. The picture she’s put together. A preacher, a good ole southern boy. One thing even with his fingers between her legs in the cab of that truck, hissing about her sin. But there’s something about him, here – the smoke and creak of machinery all around him – that is more sinister than it should be.

John glances over at the bleeding man as he passes, still held up by the two men at his sides. He gazes doesn’t linger long before he smooths his hair back with his palm, sliding his sunglasses down over his eyes. Fawn watches him disappear among the buildings. She stands and finds that her fingers are trembling. “Jesus Christ, are you alright.”

Fawn turns to look back at Staci. He’s leaning against the cruiser’s open door, his sheriff’s office uniform shrugged back over his shoulders. “I’m fine.” She wipes her hands on her shorts. “I’m fine. Thanks for taking me up here.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much for reading <3


	17. July 22nd, 2019

Fawn’s never really liked this song. The Drifters. 1962. Save the last dance for me. One of her foster mothers, the one with that beautiful lemon tree out in the backyard, used to listen to it as she did the dishes. Used to hum off-key, breaking into quiet song only at the refrain. _And don’t forget who’s taking you home,_ she’d sing to the empty kitchen, _and in whose arms you’re gonna be,_ her voice a watery echo as she ran the sink. Sometimes she’d turn it up so loud that her husband would scream across the hall to _turn it the fuck down._

Yeah, this really isn’t Fawn’s song. But Casey turns it up, sways a little as he comes out of the kitchen to fetch a beer. The refrain starts again and the bottle blonde beside her starts to sing it. Fawn can’t remember her name even though Mary May introduced them a few hours earlier. Probably because she’s distracted. Probably because John won’t take his eyes off her. So maybe this ballad to shitty jealousy is apt after all.

Fawn scoots back a little on her stool and takes a long pull of the beer Mary May poured for her. She’s hoping, in some quiet naïve part of her, that when she finishes, John won’t be there. That he’s just been a figment of her imagination. She hasn’t slept well for a few days, exhaustion pulling at the corner of her eyes. It would make sense, maybe, that she would have conjured him up from the back of her mind. But when she sets the beer back down, he’s still there and still looking right at her.

Fawn tries not to flinch from his gaze, looks instead at the bar’s front door. Mary May propped it open the Spread Eagle opened for dinner and the cool, clean night air is wafting inside. Even with the music on the jukebox, she can hear the steady thrum of the crickets in the grass beside the road. Her eyes drift back to him. He’s still got his sunglasses perched on the top of his head, not a single hair out of place, beard trimmed and neatly groomed. John’s in that vest again, the sleeves of his shirt rolled up to the elbows. His tattoos are like threats, reminders. Fawn tries not to look at his fingers. He takes a sip of the water he ordered, then leans over to whisper something to one of the men who’s come with him. He towers over John, a real mountain of a man with sandy hair pulled back into a ponytail, a grungy beard the same color. He has three dots tattooed beneath one eye, the cult symbol right in the center of his forehead. They’re quite the pair and the rest of the bar is doing a really valiant effort of pretending like they aren’t there even if there’s a no man’s land around them at least a couple feet deep.

The woman beside Fawn at the bar laughs loudly, scooting a little closer. Fawn eyes her. She’s brutally, ferociously drunk. Fawn can smell liquor on her even from a seat over. “This is terrible.” She’s not talking to anyone in particular, her voice carrying over the jukebox. “It’s really fucked up to even think like this.”

Mary May glowers at her. “Luann, do me a favor and fucking don’t.”

Luann holds her hands up in mock surrender. “I’m just saying! I mean look at him!” Fawn doesn’t need to look over to where the drunk woman is nodding. She can still feel his gaze on her, can feel his presence. He has become the center of gravity in the bar, even as everyone else inside is trying to pretend he hasn’t. “He’s _sexy_ though. Don’t you think?” Fawn can see how every muscle in Mary May’s shoulders have tensed. She turns her back, fusses with the tap. Flustered by Mary May’s cold shoulder, Luann turns to Fawn, swaying a little on her stool. She lays heavily on her hand, the liquor smell wafting over, so strong that Fawn crinkles her nose. “There’s just something about him.” She leans heavier on her hand, sighing. “Maybe it’s the tattoos.”

“Or maybe you’re just drunk.” Mary May sets a bill down heavy on the bar.

Luann plucks it from the bar, frowning. “You’re so uptight. It’s not the end of the world if I just want to look.” She glances back over in the direction Fawn refuses to look. “I just wonder if he’s good in bed, you know?” Mary May scowls, heading off back toward the kitchen. Luann nudges Fawn. “What do you think, huh? Think John Seed knows how to fuck?”

Fawn swallows hard, draining her beer. She can’t help herself. She has to look. His gaze slices her clean in two. She has to look away. “I wouldn’t know.”

The trip to the bathroom feels longer than it should. Maybe because she’s a little drunk or maybe because each step she takes toward him feels so heavy, so frightening. Or maybe the really frightening thing is how badly she wants to go over to him, to pull him against her. Fawn wishes she could have just crawled over the bar, crawled on her hands and knees, hidden away from his gaze. She wants to make him forget about her. Try to forget about him. _You don’t have to be in this nothing town,_ her brain reminds her, _you can just pick up and go back to your life._ John makes a noise in his throat when she passes and all the hairs on her neck stand straight on end. She hurries around the bar toward the bathroom, catching his reflection in one of the tin signs hanging back by the fish board. His eyes are colorless and there’s a violence in the hard line of his mouth. She wishes that made her afraid of him; she ducks quickly into the bathroom.

Her reflection startles her. Because she doesn’t look the way she feels. Because all those sleepless nights haven’t dimmed her. Junkie luck. Junkie pretty. Fawn grimaces. Feels, oddly, terrifyingly, like she wants to cry. Like she wants to be held, too tightly, too roughly. Fawn rests heavily on the sink, her breath tight in her lungs, almost trapped. She glances up at the mirror again. Her eyes are nothing but pupil. She looks suspended, frozen in time. A little like those girls who walked beside Joseph. A little like Faith. Fawn has to get the _fuck_ out of this bathroom.

And so she does, a little unsteady as she tumbles out into the back room. The song is different now, the bar sounds more crowded. He is silent when he wraps his hand around her throat. Fawn’s whole body goes rigid, her gasp a ragged, quiet thing. Both of her hands wrap around his wrist. His skin feels chilled, like he’s been out somewhere in the wilderness, like he’s just come out of some mountain stream. John’s fingers don’t tighten, he’s holding, not choking and yet there’s something about it that’s almost more frightening as he walks her back, her shoulders hitting a little roughly against the bar’s wood-paneled walls. He squeezes once, like he just wants to prove to her that he can, that he _wil_ l. Her nails dig into the skin of his wrist and his eyelids flutter, his thumb brushing across the hollow of her throat. He squeezes again, whatever brief moment of quiet tenderness that passed through him long gone now. “You wouldn’t know, hmmm?” He squeezes again, looming over her now. She looks up at him and he is sure, absolutely sure, that the way she is trembling under his grasp is doing nothing but inflaming him. “You wouldn’t know if _John Seed_ knows how to _fuck._ ”

Fawn struggles against him, pulling at his fingers under she wrenches his hand off her throat. “Fuck off, John.”

He loosens his grip, hand trailing instead across her bare shoulders, fingers toying with the straps of her shirt. “Must be something very interesting to report on here in the Spread Eagle, what with the amount of time you spend in it.” Fawn swallows hard. She knows this is a threat. Knows that this is his way of telling her that he is watching her, that he has people on her. She thinks about all those nights when she lay awake listening to the sound of idling engines, the muddy footprints she finds some mornings on her porch, deep rivets in the earth outside her bedroom window. She knows. She’s known. Fawn doesn’t know why it doesn’t scare her more. Maybe because this all feels just a little fake. Like a strange little dream, a quiet, sinister interlude. Even with John Seed’s fingers tracing the base of her throat. “Come to services again.”

Fawn blinks up at him. The bar has come rushing back into a startling clarity. Her brain slams back into her body. He’s broken through the world they’ve created that’s just the two of them, brought his brother to stand between them. It shouldn’t feel like a betrayal the way it does. “What?”

“Come listen to Joseph preach.”

Fawn pulls away from him. He reaches out to grab her wrist., to keep her close to him. “I listened to Joseph preach.” Her voice is a hiss.

John’s lips twitch and when he speaks, the words come out strained against his tight jaw. “No. You didn’t. You came to watch. To watch and judge and _take._ ” His breath is hot against her ear, body so close she can feel the heat radiating off it. “You didn’t come to listen.”

Fawn puts her hands on her chest, thumbs brushing up against _sloth,_ and pushes him away. “Why the fuck does it matter to you?”

One side of his mouth twitches, his whole body a coiled violence that she can _feel_ even if he is no longer touching her. “Because, Fawn, you might find that you like what you hear.”

“John.” They both freeze. Mary May emerges from behind the bar, rag slung over her shoulder, eyes raging. A tendon in John’s neck pulses. “If you’re gonna harass my customers, you can go ahead and get the fuck out of my bar.”

His face breaks into that awful crocodile smile again. He pushes off from the wall, smoothing his palm over his hair. “My, my. Alright then.” He takes a few steps toward her. Mary Mary recoils as he leans over. “You have a good night now.” For a moment, that sweet southern twang he was born with slip through. He looks back at Fawn and, just for a second, that façade cracks. His eyes are simmering, jaw so tight Fawn’s own teeth ache at the sight. And then it’s gone, tucked away back behind that handsome mask of his. The animal part of him, the part that is still lingering around Fawn’s neck, flashes only from behind his eyes. “And you too.”

The sound of his boots echoes on the wood floor as he walks away. Fawn hears a hush fall over the bar, hears the quiet sound of John’s voice and then the bar’s front door shut. A quiet settles in the bar then the tempo returns, a little louder than it had been before. Mary May is a flurry of movement once he’s gone, on Fawn so fast she barely has time to process it. She takes Fawn’s jaw in her hand, moving this way and that. Fawn takes Mary May by her wrists, pulling out of her grip. “Did he touch you?”

Guilt coils in Fawn’s gut. “What?”

“Did he fucking hurt you!?”

“No!” Fawn takes a step back. “No, I’m fine.” Fawn brushes her hair back behind her ears. “Really. I’m fine. He doesn’t scare me.”

Mary May’s fingers drift unconsciously to her rubs. Fawn glances down at them, then back up at her face. A chill rushes through her. “Well, he should.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much for reading <3


	18. August 2nd, 2019

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've always found the ghost hunting note you find after you liberate the hot springs like so hysterical and that really inspired this chapter. I hope you guys enjoy it!

“I’m a paranormal investigator, actually.” Fawn glances up from her plate of fries. The guy down the bar from her is in an honest to god trench coat even though the August heat has been lingering these days long after the sun has set. New in town. The irony that she knows that just ong first glance not lost on Fawn. He looks like he spends a lot of time on forums and not a lot of time out in the wild and he will not shut the fuck up. “ _Ghost hunter_ is a little passé.” She and Mary May share a glance as she comes back over to her side of the bar, both of them fighting a smile. This guy has been loud all evening, but Fawn had pretty much successfully ignored him. She’d been fixated, for a few hours at least, on the door. Sure, absolutely _positive_ , that at any moment, John Seed would come walking through it. But he hasn’t yet. And it’s late. And her biggest worry now is the sneaking disappointment she feels now that she’s sure he isn’t coming. Because some part of her, some big part even, wants to see him again. She plops a fry in her mouth, turning her back to the bar’s entrance. “Because there are a variety of entities one can detect with the right equipment.” The man taps his fingers against the bar. “Not just ghosts.” Casey’s the one he’s been talking to. He’s good at shit like this, humoring people, but even he seems to be losing interest, backing away toward the kitchen.

“Wow,” he says, straightening his apron, “cool.”

Fawn eats another fry, mouths some ketchup off her fingers, then slides over the bar toward him. She’s feeling a little feral honestly, the beer she drank settling in with the sort of wild feeling thinking about John gives her. “So ghosts, huh?” The guy nearly jumps out of his skin. He blinks at her, eyes dragging down her chest then back up to her face. His jaw’s a little slack. “I overheard you talking.” She nods toward where Casey’s disappeared. “You hunt ghosts?” Fawn hears Mary May chuckle from across the bar. She shakes her head, smiling a little, then returns to cleaning out a glass with a cloth rag.

“I-uh,” he takes a deep breath, clearing his throat, “I, uh, investigate paranormal phenomenon actually.”

“Oh, right sorry.” Fawn glances back at the front door. The jukebox is so low she can’t really hear the song’s melody. The crickets chirp loudly outside. “So, um,” Fawn drums her fingers on the bar, “is Hope County like really haunted or?”  
The man rolls his eyes, but then quickly realizes what he’s done, straightening up again and coughing conspicuously into his fist. “Hope County has many haunted locations. I mean, have you not seen all the abandoned buildings around here?”

“Sure, sure.” Fawn glances again back at the open front door, drums her fingers again on the bar.

“But what I’m really here for,” he leans a little closer, lowers his voice, “is the King’s Hot Springs Hotel. Read about it on a forum. That place is supposed to be a locus on paranormal energy”

Casey laughs, making both of them jump. He’s come out from the kitchen again, leaning heavily on the bar. “That place is bunk. Bunch a’ nonsense.” But there’s a look in his eye Fawn can’t quite place. 

“Fucking tourists.” It’s the first thing Mary May’s said since she closed up, locking the door firmly behind the last patron.

Fawn glances up from where she’s wiping glasses over at the sink. This has become part of their routine. Something they’ve never talked about outright, just another thing they’ve fallen into. Fawn finds she craves the company, finds that doing the dishes makes her feel less useless. Some tangible work now that her progress on the article has all but come to standstill. And even though she doesn’t like to admit it, heading out into the night, driving away from Fall’s End toward home, fills her with an almost childlike fear. And, sometimes, a humiliating longing. So it’s easier to just avoid it, to stretch out her time here at the Spread Eagle. And as Fawn sets the washed glasses in a neat row back by the taps, she wonders what Mary May gets out of this. It isn’t really the kind of question you can ask someone like Mary May. Too direct. Too touchy-feely. So she doesn’t. “Do you get a lot of tourists out here?”

“No really.” Mary May wipes her hands on her apron, then unties it from around her waist. “Hikers mostly. Some people passing through on their way to Seattle or sometimes Vancouver. Those tapered off a few years ago though.”

That’s her way of saying that she doesn’t want to talk about the cult tonight. So Fawn doesn’t, she hops up on the counter and cocks her head. “So.”

Mary May turns, hands on her hips. “So.”

“Is that hot spring place really haunted?”

“The hotel?” Mary May shrugs. “I don’t know. That’s what they say.”

“Okay, but what do you say?”

Mary May laughs. “Oh, I know that look. You’re not seriously fucking thinking about heading down there are you?” Fawn’s eyes glitter. “Aren’t you sposed to being writing that article you came here for? You know, the one about the peggies?”

Fawn leans back. “Maybe I’m writing one on ghosts now.” Mary May fixes her with a look. “Come on, take me out there.”

“What? Tonight?”

Fawn shrugs. “Why not? It’s not like there’s anything else to do in this town.”

“Oh, I see. Big city girl’s finally getting bored.” Mary May shakes her head, just the ghost of a smile on her lips. “You’re out of your fucking mind.”

“ _Come on._ ” Fawn nudges Mary May with her foot. “Are you seriously afraid of some ghosts?”

“Ghosts aren’t real,” Mary May says firmly.

“Then take me.”

Mary May crosses her hands over her chest, trying hard to fight off a smile. “Fine. Whatever.” She levels her finger at Fawn. “But only because you’re from out of town.”

Fawn pounds the bar, laughing. “Hell yeah. Girl’s night out.”

The air smells like sulfur. Fawn toes a pebble into the spring, watching as it sinks into the murky water, faintly green. She glances back toward the old building. From the road, it had looked almost pristine. It’s white brick walls and red shingled roof a stately combination until you got close enough to see the ravages of time and neglect. The place certainly looks haunted, a dull sort of grime hanging on the exterior. All the windows have been blown out; glass shards stuck on the sills. Fawn watches the beam of Mary May’s flashlight as it travels along the upper level. The front door had come off its hinges with a single hard shove of Mary May’s shoulder and, apparently propelled by a newfound curiously, she’d decided to hunt around inside. Fawn, feeling all her previous moxie draining away at the first sight of the dark, dusty interior, has stuck to the outside. Though it’s starting to spook her just as bad. An owl hoots from a nearby tree, the sound raising all the small hairs on the back of her neck.

Fawn feels a little lightheaded too, her vision kind of blurry. But it’s late and she’s had a few beers and too few nights of sleep. She turns back to look at the hot springs, entranced by the pale steam wafting off the surface. In the light of the moon it looks almost green. The stone of the steps where Fawn’s standing is slowly crumbling, pieces of it slipping into the spring with each small movement she makes. Her chest feels heavy, the air she exhales thick like smoke. The tall pines lining the road start to sway, but Fawn feels no wind on her skin, just an incredible stillness. Which is probably why she doesn’t hear his truck pull onto the gravel drive or his footsteps as he comes down the stairs behind her. It’s only when she feels his hands on her shoulder that she knows he’s there. Knows who it is without even turning to look. And her first impulse is to scream, but she clamps her hand hard down over her mouth, the movement sending her rocking back toward the water. John catches her, pulling her firmly onto the bottom step.

“Careful now,” he says, a little mocking, a grin spreading across his lips. And it’s relief that courses through her when it should be fear.

“What the fuck,” she manages, fingers trembling a little. Her vision’s clearing a little at least and she does feel significantly more settled now that someone’s out here with her. And John seems different too. Softer, like he’d been the very first night he’d found her on the side of the road. Like he was in that photograph, his eyes the soft blue of a summer sky. Still, she hasn’t completely lost her head, takes a half step back away from him. “What are you doing out here?”

“I could ask you the same question,” he says, chuckling. He reaches out to run his thumb along the bottom of her lip. And Fawn lets him. His fingers have been in more intimate places than that, even if that night feels like a half-dream. Fawn casts a wary glance over at the hotel. Mary May’s still on the second floor, the beam of her flashlight streaming through a window on the far end away from his truck. John fusses with one sleeve of his shirt, rolling it a little further up to his elbow. She can see the whole word there on his chest. _Sloth_ clear as day. She glances back up at him. He looks almost gentle, eyes soft, the smile on his face a little mocking, but almost sweet. Familiar. “I saw your station wagon from the road.” He cocks his head and Fawn realizes that what she likes about this smile is that it looks real, nothing like the one he’d worn the last time she saw him. “Thought I would come make sure you weren’t getting up to no good.”  
“I like you better like this.” He seems startled by that, rocking back a little, narrowing his eyes at her. She doesn’t really know where it came from either. “When you’re not showboating.”

He laughs warmly, the air shimmering around him. Fawn squints, trying to get her bearings back. “Careful now. You’ll insult me.”

“Wouldn’t want that.” But she’s stumbling a little, fighting the urge to reach out and steady herself on him.

He narrows his eyes at her, frowning. “You look a little woozy, Fawn.”

She manages a laugh even though the steam rising from the hot springs has started to thicken. “I feel a little woozy.” She tucks her hair behind her ears, fingers stiff. “I swear to god, it’s like there’s something in the water up here.”

John’s jaw tightens. “Come up away from the water.”

She blinks at him “What?”

“Away from the water.” He holds out his hand. “The sulfur has a tendency go to your head.”

Fawn frowns, about to argue when Mary May hollers from the top floor, startling both of them. “Hey!” The beam from her flashlight passes over two windows closer to where they are. Her voice carries in the quiet of the night. “Fawn. Get up here! Found something weird!”

She glances back at John, only to find that his eyes have darkened, his jaw tight “Ah, but our little reporter is not alone.” He straightens up, taking a deep breath. Fawn shivers. The night feels suddenly chilled, like autumn has sunk its early teeth into the valley. “I suppose I should leave you to whatever breaking and entering you determined to get up to tonight.”

Fawn swallows hard. She looks up at him through her lashes and fights the urge to tell him to stay, to reach out and pull him closer. “Goodbye John.”

He wavers. Slows his steps up the stairs like he’s not sure what to do next. His jaw works over words he doesn’t seem able to say before his face falls back into that sort of flippant, knowing grin. “Goodnight Fawn.” 

Fawn swats at the air. It’s thick with dust. The floor caked in mud. But despite the grime here on the second floor of the hotel, her head feels much clearer than it had beside the springs. Her heart, though, that’s still pounding in her chest. “What were you doing down there?” Mary May asks, not looking up, bent over a desk in the hotel’s office.

“Checking out the hot springs,” Fawn replies, giving the upper level a once-over. It’s spooky in the most classic sense, the enormous antler chandelier groaning as it swings from the force of an unseen wind. The floorboards creak under them.

“Oh yeah, you ever been in one?”

Once. With her old college boyfriend out in the Apple Valley. It seems like a dream now. Like a whole lifetime ago. “Yeah.”

“I bet this one’s still safe to use. If the cult hasn’t been dumping their trash in it.”

Fawn turns around to look at her, eyebrow raised. “Do they do that? Just dump their shit around here?” 

Mary May shrugs then sets a heavy folder down on the desk, tapping with a singular painted nail. “Check this out. Found it in one of the desk’s drawers. Looks like we aren’t the only ones fucking around in this place.”

Fawn glances over her shoulder one last time before approaching the desk. “What is it?”

Mary May nods at it. “Take a look.”

That dread washes over Fawn again, her fingers hesitating at the corner of the manila folder. She shakes it off and opens it. It’s a list. Of names, as far as she can tell. All uniform just off the left side. Just pages and pages of names. She flips through a few, scanning them to see if there are any she recognizes. She doesn’t find any. But there’s got to be nearly a hundred pages in the folder and toward the back, some of the names are crossed out. Fawn looks up at Mary May, her face ghoulish in the beam of the flashlight. “Do you know these people?”

“Some of them. Some of them I don’t.”

“Jesus Christ.” Fawn flips through until she finds a paper thicker than the rest. Her heart stutters in her chest. It’s mistakable of course, that symbol. She closes the folder.

“What?” Mary May frowns. “What did you find?”

Fawn takes a deep breath, tucking the folder under her arm. “Nothing.” She looks out the window, out at the tracks John’s truck left in the gravel. “Nothing. Just weird is all. Spooky, I guess.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much for reading <3


	19. August 5th, 2019

There’s something wrong with his skin. What at first she’d clocked as acne scars are, upon closer inspection, actually probably burns. Old burns that have chewed up the skin of his cheeks, left one side of his forehead marred and almost twisted, like a gash of pain across a canvas. They’re long healed, but they still look painfully raw..

It’s the first thought Fawn has and maybe the most useless. Because he is the biggest brother by far. Which she knew. At least a little. From her research; from the few photos she’d found of Jacob Seed, most of them alongside his brothers, looming a head above them both. He is even bigger in person. And he is crowding her, dog tags swinging menacingly just in front of her nose. Fawn holds the case of coke she’s bought from the gas station to her chest and tries, as best she can, to get her bearings. But there’s something disorienting about him. A quiet, cool confidence that sits behind a pair of intelligent blue eyes. The color of robin’s eggs. The pastel sweetness of early spring. Fawn has no doubt, as she looks into those eyes, that he could kill her like it was nothing. The thought feels as crazy as it feels true. 

He oozes violence. They all do, in their way. Joseph’s is incidental. A product of his simmering narcissism, his delusions of grandeur. John’s is unpredictable. A sparking, mercurial mess oscillating wildly between charming and uncontrolled. But Jacob Seed is a different animal. She can feel that. Like everything he’s ever done is something he’s planned. Thought carefully out. It is _terrifying._

And he’s been speaking to her. And she hadn’t heard a word, caught up in her own thoughts She blinks up at him, understanding maybe for the first time that no one outside the store has even stopped to check and see if she’s alright. That even though she can hear the gas station’s front door dinging, Jacob has created a world around them, separate from the rest. Even the hot afternoon sun seems different, paler than it had just moments ago.

“I know you were up there,” he says, and she doesn’t ask where or how he knows. It doesn’t really matter. If John can find her three times now in the middle of the night, certainly his brother can find her at the county’s singular grocery store in the middle of the afternoon. “Mind yourself, girl.” His voice has a deep, rumbly Sothern cadence that feels immediately menacing, like an echo of something terrifying and far away. Sugary, in a rotten way. “Don’t poke your nose where it shouldn’t be.”

Fawn remembers herself, scowls at him. “And where’s that?”

She watches his adam’s apple bob, his nostrils flare. He cocks his head, not in the curious way John does, like he’s trying to pick something apart, but instead like he’s trying to contain a deep well of anger, like his body is rigid against the effort. And she realizes, as he rocks a little back, that he could probably beat her bloody out here before anyone would stop him. Realizes that maybe that’s exactly what he intends to do. “I’ll handle her, brother.” The air slows. Fawn reads the sins on his fingers as they curl over Jacob’s shoulder and the relief that rushes through her is a terror of its own. Jacob straightens up. He glances from her to his brother, then back again before nodding, clapping John on the shoulder. For a moment she is sure they are going to rest their foreheads against each other, a tenderness passing between them that seems completely at odds with everything else she knows about the Seed brothers, her own assessment rapidly revising itself as she watches them. But then Jacob walks away, not sparing her a singular backward glance, and hauls himself into the cab of a beatdown old truck. John watches as he pulls back onto the highway, then he turns, just slightly, to glance back at Fawn.

She swallows hard. Unsure what she should say. _Thank you_ feels…out of place, but she does get the sense that John has saved her from something. That he’s done her a favor. Still, his appearance, and Jacob’s barely veiled threat, spikes her ire. And when John turns all the way around to look at her, she brushes him off, hiking the case of coke up on her hip and heading around the corner toward where she’d parked her station wagon. “Fawn.” She hears him start to follow. “ _Fawn!_ ”

“Fuck off, John. I’m really not in the mood.” His laugh is humorless and when she turns to look at him, to try to really drive her point home, she finds a face twisted in rage. And he’s closer than she expected him to be, only a few inches from her. Fawn wavers. Torn between the desire to back away and a sudden rush of longing that nearly has her reaching for him. His colorless eyes stop her, make her go almost rigid. She’s never seen him like this. Even on the night he’d fucked her with his fingers in the cab of his truck he’d been more controlled than this. Today his hair is almost unkempt, a few strands falling across his forehead, one eye bloodshot, three deep scratches at the base of his neck. “John are you-“

“Mind your business, little Fawn.”

She scowls at him. “I’m a journalist, John. That’s not really how it works.”

He pushes her back against the wall, one hand on her throat. Fawn yelps, her nails digging into the skin of his wrist. She struggles against him, but his hold only tightens. His voice is a hoarse whisper, so close to her that his breath is hot on her cheek. “You are involving yourself in things you don’t understand.”

Fawn glowers up at him, speaking through gritted teeth. “Then explain them to me.”

John’s nostrils flare. His grip tightens around her neck but his thumb is rubbing soft circles just under her jaw. A dichotomy that has her heart jumping under her ribs. His eyes flit down her body and Fawn watches as a muscle twitches in his jaw. He tugs at the hem of her shorts, pulling her hips violently forward. Fawn gags as his other hand bears down on her throat. “Do you know how badly you make me want to fuck you?” Fawn swallows hard. John meets her eyes, mouth curled up into a snarl. He releases her throat, but only to lean hard against the wall, caging her in. “Bent over outside like an _animal._ Do you want that, Fawn? Is _that_ what you want?” He propels off the wall away from her before she can even open her mouth to answer, backing away, raking his fingers through his hair. Fawn keeps her back to the wall, limbs stiff and unyielding, like they’ve stopped listening, developed minds of their own. John looks at her, a searing desperation in his eyes, his body buzzing with a wild energy, like it can’t stay still. “You sharpen the sin in me.” His nostrils flare, disgusted. Then he closes the distance between them again. Fawn flinches, hands coming up to shield her face. And that does something to him, that sudden movement. His eyes soften and he stands up a little straighter. That quiet competence that had so drawn her to him returning, the lawyer in him rising again to the surface. And something else. He reaches out, running his thumb gently across her lips. His eyes, for just the briefest moment, are full of pain. “No good comes from harm’s way.” And then he kisses her. Softly. Like a lover. He holds her face to his. Kisses her harder when she reaches up to hold onto his shoulders. And then he’s gone, pulling away from her, looking back only once as he heads toward his truck.

Fawn pants, on the verge of tears. Angry and afraid and full to the brim with longing. She closes her eyes and just heaves, palms flat against the side of the building. Listens to his truck as it roars to life, listens as he pulls away. Fawn wants to chase after him, wants to crawl into the passenger’s seat and just let him drive. She’ll go wherever he wants her to.

These thoughts they terrify her. Make her feel young and small and helpless in a way that rings so familiar. A long-buried feeling, one she’s run so long from. Fawn takes a deep breath and opens her eyes. That cloudless, summer sky stretches on and on. She kneads at her temples, taking another shaky breath. “You’re fine,” she says under her breath, “you’re fine.”

“I don't wanna talk about Iraq. Or the fucking Gulf.”

“I’m not calling about the war.” Fawn’s taken the phone out to the front porch, the cord stretched to its limit across the kitchen floor. She’s in her underwear and that ratty Laker’s shirt, a joint burning down between her two fingers as she sits cross-legged on the worn wood. Not the most professional way to go about this, sure, but she’d needed a little extra courage. She doesn’t talk to military in her usual beat – veteran or otherwise – and it’s spooked her a little. The number Dutch gave her languishing on the kitchen table for more than two weeks. But seeing Jacob in the flesh had been enough motivation to finally call. She’d thought briefly, as she dialed the number, of calling Adam first. Of asking for his advice. But they haven’t talked in weeks. She’s going in blind. “Just wanted some more information about one of the men you served with.”

“And this is for what newspaper now?” He’s got a thick Texas twang, a suspicion that comes through clear in his voice.

“The New York Times. I’m a staff reporter with the paper, doing a story about a religious group out in Montana.”

“I ain’t never been to Montana.”

Fawn clicks her pen on her notepad. “I understand that, but the information I have says one of the high-ranking members of the group served in your company. You were in Kuwait in 1993 correct? With the 82nd Airborne Division?” The man grunts affirmative. “And you served with Jacob Seed correct? Can you tell me if-“

“I’m sorry did you just say Jacob Seed?” The man’s voice is suddenly tight, tense.

“Uh, yes.” She flips through her folder. “Jacob Alexander Seed. Born 1974. He would have been probably around nineteen at the time and I’m not sure if-“

“Now you listen to me.” Fawn straightens up. “I don’t know who you are but you stay the _fuck_ away from John Seed. That man eats people.”

The air slows around her. She taps the ash from the end of her joint. “I’m sorry, what was that?”

“You heard me.” The line clicks and for a moment Fawn just holds the phone to her ear. Then, slowly, she pulls it away from her face just staring at the receiver. She blinks like she’s trying to wake herself up. The sun is a split yolk across the treetops, darkness rising up around her as it sets.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading <3


	20. August 17th, 2019*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a quick reminder that while there is no out and out non-con in this fic, there is definitely rough sex and some dub con so please take care of yourselves if you think this might be triggering for you.

She sees him through the front window. And there’s a moment, just one, where he doesn’t see her and she can really look at him. Watch him without him having the upper hand. And what she sees is stillness, a patience almost ominous in its breadth. Like he could stand outside her door for an eternity, waiting there for her. That longing again, that dread. She rarely has one without the other anymore. Fawn wishes she could see the color of his eyes. She opens the door anyway. Realizing only when John raises a single eyebrow that she’s still dressed only in that ratty t-shirt and her underwear. Fawn falters, one hand gripping the doorframe for dear life. So much for an upper hand.

All around them the blue dark of new night has settled, stars appear one by one in the void left by the sun. Fawn takes a step back. John takes a step forward. She fights the urge to bare her teeth. He doesn’t. His smile the most sinister she’s seen on him. “Where have you been?”

Fawn swallows. Here. Here is where she’s been. Hiding out. Avoiding the Spread Eagle and the gas station. Holing up here to try and collect her thoughts. To reign herself back in. To stop masturbating to the memory of John’s touch. To pour over Jacob’s discharge papers, looking for any veiled language that could possibly allude to cannibalism, unable to fight off the image of that man crouched over a corpse, blood streaked across his face, strings of muscle caught in his teeth. To reread The Book of Joseph, trying to pull something useful out of its rambling.

Mostly she’s been drinking bad coffee. Mostly she’s been sitting in her bathtub. Mostly she’s been smoking the last of her weed. And it’s left her unsteady. Too unsteady to withstand the force of him. But she tries, straightening up. “You can’t just show up here.”

He drums his fingers on the doorframe. “Ah, but it seems that I can.”

Fawn swallows hard. She makes an aborted attempt to take another step back before deciding to stand her ground. Glee flashes his eyes, the look of a predator at the start of his hunt. She wants to throttle him. She wants him to reach out and throttle her. Her thinking brain begs her to tell him to fuck off. Fawn opens the door wider, stepping just out of the way. “Want some coffee?”

She tells herself that this is an interview. That this is her scoop, the way to finally get this story off the ground. She tells herself that as he backs her into the bedroom, pulling her t-shirt over her head. She tells herself that again when her back hits the mattress and the seven sins are parting her legs. But when he pauses at the edge of the bed, that tightly coiled violence writ in every muscle in his body, her thoughts go quiet. All she can hear is her own breathing, the sound of her heart pounding in her ears. “You have no right to be this beautiful.” His voice is a snarl. Then, without another word, he drags her by her ankles down the bed. Fawn yelps, but doesn’t have time to reach out, to say anything at all before he’s crawling up her, kissing along her neck, all teeth and tongue, his hands bruising on her thighs. “It’s against God.” John makes a sound closer to a growl than any human man has a right to make and Fawn glances down to see that he’s making a frenzied attempt to rid himself of his jeans.

Fawn uses his moment of distraction to grab at him, digging her nails into the skin of his jaw. He hisses at the sensation, hips canting forward. “I read your stupid book.” She grips him harder, trying to wrestle back some ounce of control. “It says that fornication is a si-“

His fingers curl tightly around her throat, the full weight of him bearing down on her. “That’s enough talking.” And then he’s inside her, thrusting at a brutal pace, fucking her up into the bedframe, the floor creaking and groaning as they move. Fawn claws at him, but he doesn’t relent. One hand still on her throat, the other undoing the buttons of his shirt. Fawn’s vision starts to go dark around the edges, gasping for breath just out of reach. She struggles hard against him, feels her nails draw blood. John leans down to kiss her, releases her throat. Her first breath is into his mouth. He swirls his hips and it takes her a moment to realize the moaning she hears is her own. “You bring out the sin in me.” He growls into the shell of her ear. Heat coils between Fawn’s hips, spreading balmy across her whole body. “You are my end times.”

Fawn grabs his face. She snarls at him, her hips rushing to meet his thrusts. “Stop talking like that.”

John chuckles, kissing her cheek almost tenderly before doubling down, thrusting so hard into her that her hips twinge. “You don’t like riddles, Fawn? The let me be very,” a hard thrust, “very,” another, “clear. You’re going to cum on my cock.” Fawn squeezes his wrists, his blood smearing across his skin, her nails. “You’re going to scream my name.” Fawn’s thighs start to shake, she arches up to meet him. “Is that what you want?” Fawn moans, rocking her hips toward him, but his have stilled. “Is that what you want, Fawn? You have to tell me.”

“Yes.” Her voice like a spell, every muscle in his body tenses, then releases. And then he is on her again, like an animal. John reaches down, searching for her clit. She moans when he finds it, melting into his touch. He is all around her. The smell of him, the feeling of his touch. She whimpers, that slow burn spiking. Her orgasm takes her like an ambush and all she can do is cling to him.

For a moment they are both still. Their bodies slick with sweat, pressed close to each other. John pants against her neck, his hair falling into his face, skimming across her chest. His voice is slow, thick with desire. “I’m gonna fuck you until you are laid bare to me.” He nips at her throat. “Until I can read your body like a book.”

Fawn grabs hold of him, nails digging hard into the skin of his shoulders. “Fuck you,” is all she can manage. John laughs in her ear and lifts one of her legs up over his shoulder, his cock deep inside of her. She holds onto him. She holds onto him for dear life.

John seems mollified when it’s over. Laying back on the bed, his softening cock against his thigh. Men are the most vulnerable when they’re like this, Fawn thinks. Once they’ve cum. And seeing him like this uncurls a strange tenderness inside of her. She watches as he drapes one hand over his eyes, exhaling softly. The sound so completely at odds with the way he’s just fucked her. Fawn rolls onto her side, her own body soft and relaxed, like it’s been worked through, come to some kind of catharsis. She looks over at him, looks down the lean, hard lines of his body. There’s a vanity to the muscles on his body, an extension of his neatly trimmed beard, his carefully coiffed hair. And yet his skin is so brutally marked. The tattoos end at his arms, but so much has been carved into his stomach, his chest. Brutal, painful-looking scars. _Greed_ is cut angrily into his rubs, _gluttony_ carved so deeply into the skin of his thigh that the scars are a raised, bulbous pink. _Lust_ curves along his hip. She sees that it’s been worked over, freshly scabbed. Fawn’s eyes wander up, finding an older set of scars at the very top of his thigh. They’re barely raised, just a few shades paler than his own skin. A dozen of them, maybe more. Short cuts all in a row. Uniform save for a few jagged cuts at the very top. Fawn remembers that singular line in the Book of Joseph, the one that had cut her clean through. _He had started beating our little brother John._ And she wonders how much of his pain he has carved right into his skin. A witness, a quiet testament. A friend. “You can touch me Fawn.” She freezes, only just realizing that she’s sat up, leaning on her elbow, her fingers hovering just above his skin. She retracts her hand. John moves his hand to reveal one eye, an almost boyish grin on his face. “I won’t bite.”

Fawn sits back. “I don’t believe you.” It’s a joke and it isn’t. 

John chuckles, sliding his hand from his face and shifting onto his side to look at her. He looks at her for a long time. So long she begins to fidget under his gaze. Everything that he has ever done that has scared her comes rushing back. And maybe he can feel it because he reaches out to cup her face, pulls her back down onto the bed. He brushes his thumb across her cheekbones, lingers on the bridge of her nose. “Did you mother name you Fawn for your freckles.”

Fawn flinches. “I don’t try to understand anything my mother did.” Then she flinches again. She’s revealed more than she wanted to, should have just said yes. But John just hums, like he understands. And maybe he does. His mother, the way Joseph wrote her at least, was a shell of a woman. Watching blankly at the chaos boiling over onto her children. Maybe Fawn should ask him about that, maybe she should kick the door she already has her foot in. But John’s hands are already moving again, hunting down the taut planes of her stomach. His fingers trace the divot of her hip, brushing down her thighs, finding a piece of himself smeared between them. He’d cum inside of her and the feeling of it dripping down her things spikes fresh longing in her. It’s feral. Primordial. Makes her feel like they might be the only two people on the planet. He smears his cum along her skin with the pads of his fingers. “I want you to be mine.”

Fawn frowns, grabbing his wrist to still his hand. “I’m not up for grabs,”

John sits a little up propping his head on his hands. He twirls a strand of her hair around his finger. “We’ll see.”

She bats him away. “I hate it when you’re like this.” Which is, at least partly, a lie. But one she tells confidently. John grunts as he rolls a little on top of her, that surprising, hidden strength again. He rests his hand on her throat, just the barest pressure. “I’m sorry,” he says, running his thumb along the skin of her neck. And it sounds like both an apology and a promise. John kisses her, his fingers tighten around her throat. 

Sunlight streams across her bare skin. The birds have woken her, chirping from a low branch outside her window. She’s groggy, sleep hanging heavy on her, but she thinks, as she sits up, that this might be the deepest and longest she’s slept since she set foot in the county.

Fawn turns to look at the empty space beside her in bed, at the crinkled sheets. She isn’t surprised to find it empty. And is, mostly, relieved. Because to see him in the light of the day, with the sun streaming across his bare body…no, it’s not worth thinking about. That pang of guilt in her chest again.

Fawn pulls her t-shirt back over her head, pads barefoot into the kitchen. He’s left her a pot of coffee, real coffee, and she isn’t quite sure how to feel about it, leans heavily against the counter for a long time trying to figure what the fuck really happened, what she’s going to do next. The insides of her thighs are tacky, the remnants of him still on her. She doesn’t have room in her head to figure any of this out and instead pours her a cup of that coffee. She’s got it nearly to her lips when she sees the note. A page torn out of one of her notebooks, scrawled in his neat hand. _The end is near Fawn. I want you to walk through the gates of Eden and there’s not much time. Come listen to Joseph speak._ She crumples it in her fist, tosses it in the trash.

“It’s been a while.”

Fawn takes a deep breath, drinks some of the coffee John left her even though it’s gone cold. “I know.” She swallows. “I’m sorry.”

“I was a little worried, I won’t lie.” She can hear clicking on the other end of the line. She imagines him in the office, phone caught between his ear and shoulder, typing away.

Fawn leans back, pulls one leg up onto her chair, rests her chin on it. “About me?”

“Of course, about you. Who else? You’re out in the goddamn boonies. Fuck I haven’t heard from you in weeks. I figured you’d been eaten by a mountain lion or something.”

Fawn laughs, but there’s no humor behind it. She feels bottomless, a quiet anxiety that she can’t seem to shake. A hole has opened up in the wake of John’s departure. The note he’d scrawled still stuck like a bur in her brain. “No, still here.”

“So, how’s the article?”

Fawn swallows hard. “Adam, listen, I need to ask you something, okay? I need you to be totally honest with me.”

She hears the typing stop, hears him sit up a little in his chair. His voice is measured, serious now. “Okay.”

“Why did you leave North Korea?” Adam clears his throat. Fawn presses the phone close to his ear. “Adam, I’m serious. I…I need to know okay. I need to know why you quit the international beat. I’m just…I’m surrounded by craziness okay? I’m listening to people who think the ends times are right around the corner. I just…want some reassurance alright? That things aren’t falling apart everywhere else.” 

“So they are a doomsday cult then? That little group out there.”

Fawn gulps. “Yeah, I guess so.” 

“Huh.” She is frozen, the air around her slowing. This feels like a dream, the light filtering strangely through the windows just like it had when she sat through Joseph’s sermon.

“What?”

“Why are you asking me?”

“Because I…” Fawn wavers. “I don’t know.” She kneads at her temples. “Things are just…things have gotten kind of weird here. Just...” She doesn’t say what she wants to say. She doesn’t ask him to tell her everything’s okay. Because that would make her feel young and helpless and John Seed has already done a thorough job of that.

“Are you alright?”

“Yeah,” Fawn holds her hand out in front of her, flexing her fingers. They’re trembling, just faintly. “Yeah I’m alright, I just-“

“Have you been listening to the news?”

Fawn blinks. Has she? Fuck, when was the last time she’d even watched the news? Even taken a cursory glance at a newspaper? “I…no, not really.”

“Well…” Fawn feels a chill race up her spine. “Shit’s back out there. Worse than people think. A lot worse. And maybe I just…maybe I just wanted to spend the last few years of my life in close proximity to a solid pizza by the slice in the city where I was born.”

“The last few years of your life? What the fuck are you talking about?”

“I don’t think we have a lot of time left. Like, the whole planet.”

“You’re fucking with me.”

“I’m not, Fawn. I’m really not. I saw a lot of shit on assignment that I don’t think I was supposed to.” He takes a deep breath. “I think the world is ending. I don’t know when. Could be twenty years from now, could be tomorrow. But…I think it really is ending.” Fawn sets the phone down on the table. She can hear his voice over the line but can’t bring herself to pick it back up. The Book of Joseph sits at the far end of the table. Fawn reaches for it. Recoils when she touches it. Like it’s burned her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My experience with criminal/clinical psychology is admittedly zero, but I’ve always kind of liked the idea that John’s sadistic tendencies actually come from a very deep-seated masochism. And that Joseph’s philosophy became a “legitimate” outlet for John’s self-harm. But also I’ve kind of always imagined that John has been self-harming for a long time, like probably since early childhood and I wanted his body to reflect that. 
> 
> Thank you so much for reading <3 <3


	21. August 24th, 2019

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Heyo. Mind the tags, guys. The shit is hitting the fan.

She’s not sure how she ended up here. Pulled off onto the shoulder of the highway, her car idling, the radio turned low. She’s not even really sure where she is.

She’d driven east toward the river, feeling hollowed out, drifting. The field drew her in. Meadow as far as the eye can see, white bell-shaped flowers sprouting from lush, verdant stems. Their wide leaves shimmering in the sun. The afternoon sky a cloudless blue that seems to stretch on forever, the sun splendid as its rays beat down on Fawn’s dash. And she finds, as she unbuckles her seatbelt, that she doesn’t really have it in her to drive away. Maybe she just wants a quiet place to think about the end of the world.

She’s been doing lots of thinking about that lately. Tossing and turning in bed, trying to wrestle with the horrible, violent images rocketing through her brain every time she thought about what the end of the world might even mean. What it would look like, feel like. Fawn shivers even in the summer heat.

She’d started out, right after she hung up the phone that night, trying to figure out if Adam had maybe gone crazy. It was possible, surely. His ex-wife had moved back to the city only a few months after he started the local beat and Fawn has long suspected that the sudden renewed proximity crossed his wires a little. But the more she thought about it, the more her sleepless nights blended together, she’d started to wonder if the phone call had happened at all. Because it felt like a dream. That whole night and all the nights that have followed.

Fawn kills the engine and decides that maybe it doesn’t matter if it was real or not. That she’s driven all this way to try and clear her head not muddy things more. She opens the door, an unseasonable chill sharp in the air as she does. The sun warms her when it touches her skin, that cold fleeting. At first, she smells the usual soft notes of cedar and pine, the scent of a far-off campfire, but as she steps out toward the field of flowers she is overcome with another scent. The air is thick with it. Saccharine, tinged with rot. She can almost taste it on her tongue. A dark sugar. That must be why there are so many bees. She’s never really seen bees like this though. They stick close to the ground, drifting slowly in the air, bumping into each other as they go. Fawn watches as one settles on the gravel, its little wings fluttering, its body too heavy to lift off again.

Fawn glances back at her car, back at the empty highway beyond it, then turns to look at the field of flowers. She’d first found the cult a week after her Epstein story ran. She’d been sitting curled in her desk chair, chewing the end of a pencil, scrolling and scrolling to fill her mind with anything that could distract her from the storm that was settling over her. An inbox full of death threats, a mailbox full of terrifying envelopes with law firm return addresses. 

She doesn’t remember what she’d googled. Maybe _beautiful locations_ or _retreat_ or _best vacation spots in Western America_ or _places to run away._ And that’s when she’d seen the meadow. A flash of pale green nestled in a valley that looked tucked in by the peaks, above the tall grass a spray of wildflowers, their bent stems evoking the feeling of a soft, warm wind. In that moment, surrounded by the noise and the bustle of her office, Fawn had wanted nothing more than to stand in the center of that meadow, to feel the quiet all around her. She’d clicked the image, found a short article only a few sentences long from the Helena Independent Record. _Southern religious group settles in Northern Montana. Spokesman John Seed said the group is looking forward to making strong connections within the community. Locals have mixed reaction to their arrival._ The picture had been a stock photo, something they’d used to put as a header on the website. That had been the start.

Funny that she should be remembering it now, as she heads into this meadow, hands at her sides, brushing against the flowers. Their petals are gossamer, veins like little spider webs, leaves shimmering with dew even though they haven’t had rain in a week. But the air does seem full of something. Like the sparkle of snow after the kick of a winter wind. But it’s the height of summer and the air is so still that the sickly-sweet smell of the flowers feels like it’s settling on her skin. Suddenly Fawn hears a dish break. The sound coming loudly from nowhere, sharply beside her left ear. She ducks down instinctually, hands on her ears. The sound comes louder, seemingly from everywhere and the air has taken on a new shape. It waves at the edges of her vision, a womp sound like a heavy propeller picking up tempo. 

Fawn turns back and finds that she can’t see her car, can’t see the highway at all. What had, from the side of the road, looked like a simple meadow is now a dense maze of flowers. Their stems rise up toward the sky, nearly taller than she is. The smell in the air shifts, gets denser and then, all at once, it’s that burnt sugar smell of heroin, the rattle in her mother’s throat rising up all around her. Her heart pounding in time with it. And then the air goes still, so fast she nearly loses her balance, and all Fawn can smell is lemons and that sound of breaking plates is getting faster and faster and closer and closer and Fawn can’t breathe. Can barely think

The flowers must be some kind of opioid. Her thoughts are slow, but she manages that one. Like poppies, she thinks, but stronger. She used to take shrooms as a teenager, trip hard out in a shitty Safeway parking lot to watch the stoplights pulse, the neon shiver. She crushes one of the flowers in her palm, its petals sticky against her skin. Knowing it changes nothing. The flowers spade her under.

Fawn stumbles at the sound of another dish, falls to her knees in the dirt and soon the dirt is sand and the waves come rushing toward her. The water finds her hands, seafoam lingering between her splayed fingers. Beside her, a starfish convulses, twitching. Fawn screams, her palms turned up toward the sky, the sun watery around her. The world tips and Fawn scrambles to her feet. The ground is dirt again, the water gone. The air doesn’t smell like lemons anymore, just sugar, just rot. Fear makes her rigid, makes her unsteady as she stumbles through the flowers back toward the direction of where she thinks her car should be, tearing at their thick stems to try and keep herself upright. She is starting to feel sick, starting to feel like the earth is going to rise up and swallow her whole. And then she hears her name. She turns and the world turns with her, the air slow, every sound echoing over and over.

John is wandering toward her in the field. The flowers part for him and he looks every bit the saint he had up on that billboard. Iconoclastic. Untouchable. Frighteningly serene. He holds his hand out to her and, for the first time since she set foot in Hope County, her thinking brain wins. She turns on her heel and runs.

And maybe he expected that. Or maybe there is a predator inside of him. Quick on the draw, brutally efficient, and his arm is around her waist before she can even take another step. He yanks her back, her hair slow in the thick air, billowing in front of her as he pulls back, the flowers exhaling all around her. Her voice is thick, her words jumbled.

John says nothing as he pulls her through the flowers, pulls her up onto the shoulder of the road. Her vision is straightening out, but her thoughts are still murky. She glances over at her car, realizes that he isn’t taking her back to it. Fawn kicks her legs, struggles against him and he pulls her onto the road, his grip tightening “Hush now.” John opens the door to his truck, lifts her into the seat. He shushes her, smoothing her hair back from her face. And then he shuts the door.

In the warm air of the car, her thoughts even out. She watches as he swings himself up inside, as he puts the truck in gear, and realizes, blearily, that she has, for all intents and purposes, been kidnapped. She looks at him as they pull out onto the highway, her vision still wobbly, but she can see that he is agitated. He grips the steering wheel then turns to her. “Are you a user?”

She squints. “A what?”

His tone is clipped. “Heroin. Opiates. Are you a user?”

Fawn recoils from him. “Of course not, fuck you!”

He frowns. “Defensive.” John yanks one of her arms over, the truck swerving a little as he does. He looks carefully at it, before roughly discarding it. “But I believe you.” She wants to tell him that loads of junkies don’t shoot up in their arms. That if he really wants to check he should look between her toes, at the pulsing vein in the soft space between her hip and the center of her. But the world is wobbling again. Her whole body is shaking. “Usually only addicts react like that to the Bliss.”

Fawn shivers, holding herself tightly. They’ve turned back toward Holland Valley, heading south, skirting Fall’s End. “The what?” But before he even has a chance to deflect or answer, the world suddenly flips, that sparkle again at the corners of her eyes “Oh god, pull over.” He doesn’t. She reaches for him digging her nails into his skin. “Pull the fuck over, John. I’m going to be sick.”

The brakes screech and she tumbles out of the passenger side. Fawn retches into the gravel, the sun too bright all around her. She closes her eyes, her equilibrium shot. Fawn trembles, opening her eyes again to find that the world is still woozy, wiping at her face with her arm. Her skin is chilled, goosebumps racing up it. She turns at the sound of gravel crunching under boots and finds that John has gotten out too, his arms crossed over his chest. “Take me home.” She leans heavily on her hands, the ground still rocking underneath her.

“No.”

A chill races up her. “ _Take me home, John.”_

His boots kick up dirt on the approach and when he reaches her, he crouches down so their eyes are level. “No.” Fawn swallows hard. She notices, for the first time, that he has a gun tucked in the waist of his pants. Her mouth works over words she can’t seem to grab hold of. And then she look back at him, pleading. His eyes have no color. He is looking right through her.

John hoists her bodily over his shoulder, ignoring her yelps, and heaves her hard back into the seat. He buckles her in, straightening her clothes. “I doubt you’ll get sick again. Usually with the Bliss it’s only once”

“Take me home.” Her voice is weaker now, the world is still wobbling. He says nothing, just shuts the door.

He is carrying her, carrying her like a bride over a threshold. And she is so weak, so terrified, that she lets him. Funny, she thinks, that is this is about letting him. _Naïve_. If she had any power at all here, she’d be home now. She doesn’t know where she is, but it’s not anywhere she’s been before. A cabin, maybe. But it’s too big for that. Fawn leans into his chest, closes her eyes so the world will stop spinning. She can smell that metallic scent again on his skin, the leather of his coat. ‘Take me home,” she breathes into his neck.

He sets her hard down onto the ground, her fingers find the fibers of a rug. They feel expensive. It’s an odd thought. One John doesn’t give her time to process because he’s crouching down in front of her now, pulling her jeans down her legs. She tries to wriggle away. “Don’t fucking touch me, John.”

He acts as though he hasn’t heard her, bunching her jeans around her knees, leaning back to fish through a bag at his side. “Stay still.” She thrashes against him again and his grip tightens on her thigh. “ _Stay. Still._ ”

The needle he produces is long, menacing, he works the cover off with his teeth. Fawn’s chest shudders, her breathing coming hard and fast. “John, please, _please._ ”

He softens his grip, thumb running circles along her exposed skin. “Stop struggling. If I was going to hurt you, I would have done it already.”

She hisses at him. “Don’t fucking threaten me.”

John holds her thigh still. Her vision is still blurred, but she can see that all the muscles in his arms are tense. “You shouldn’t have gone into that field. You should have stayed in Holland Valley.” He looks up at her, eyes burning. “ _With me._ ” Fawn swallows hard. The needle pricks her skin and the rush of pain sends her gasping. John cups her face, his eyes softening as he injects her. “It’s alright.” She grips his wrist. “It’s alright now.”

“What are you doing to me?” John wipes at the tears now streaming down her cheeks. “John, what is happening?”

He hushes her, pulling the needle from her thigh, and holding her close to his chest. “This world is a dark dream. And it will be over soon. We will all be cleansed.” He doesn’t sound like himself. He sounds like the book. Like an echo of it. “I have you,” he says and this time it’s in his own voice. “You’re safe now.” He rests his lips on her hairline, rests his hand on the spot where he’s injected her. Fawn clings to him as darkness overtakes her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading <3


	22. August 25th-26th, 2019

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kind of on a roll today with updates lol. I hope you enjoy! Your comments and kudos give me life <3

Fawn can’t stop shaking. She’s lit a joint, watches as it trembles between her fingers. She can hear Mary May banging around in the kitchen. Fawn doesn’t have any real food here. They both know that. She just needs the distraction and Fawn has appreciated the chance to just be alone with her thoughts. She tenses when she hears Mary May head down the hall toward her.

Mary May sets a cup of coffee down beside Fawn, leans back onto the desk. “Have you done it?” Fawn shakes her head, warming her fingers on the coffee mug. She has her windows open, a cool night breeze wafting inside. “You need to.”

Fawn doesn’t look at her, just looks at her folder. Thick now, damning. It has been damning for a long time. She’d just been unwilling to look. “I know.” Her head still feels foggy and the spot on her thigh where John injected her with god knows what is now a livid, spreading bruise. “I know.”

Mary May taps her palm once, twice on the desk then pushes off from it. “I’m gonna boil some water. You got pasta in this shithole?”

Fawn takes a long drag from her joint, sniffs, her sinuses fucked from all the crying she’s been doing. “Somewhere I’m sure.” Mary May leaves her alone, leaves her in the silence of her bedroom. These four walls feel like the beginning and the end of her world.

Fawn runs her fingers along the bruise, along the same path John’s fingers took across her skin. Adrenaline, Mary May told her. That’s probably what he’d injected her with. To counteract the Bliss. Which Fawn still doesn’t understand, feels too weary to even try. She’d made a few notes about the presence of a grow operation over by the river her first month here, tracked a large shipment of grow lights and fertilizer coming into the county. But she’d gotten distracted. That much is abundantly clear now.

His number is sitting on her desk, where’s it’s been since he first gave it to her that night. It’s a little crumpled and she still feels, despite everything, an incredible urge to call it. To bring him back here. Her distraction in the flesh. Disgust overtakes shame. She leans back in her chair and takes another long hit of her joint.

She’d woken up in his bed. A big four-poster affair. In a room with high-vaulted ceilings and wide windows overlooking a spectacular mountain vista. Shearling rugs and heavy oak furniture. She could feel the thread count of the sheets wrapped around her, soft and expensive. John had taken her pants off, folded them over the back of a chair across the room. But the spot beside her was undisturbed. He’d slept somewhere else. Almost thoughtful. Terror had crashed down on her anyway, the events of the day before coming tumbling back.

She hadn’t waited to figure out what had happened, or what was going to happen. She’d fled, breaking off into a long field away from his ranch. A compound, more like. It’s no wonder he never took her here. It reeked of violence; the cult symbol strung along the awnings of the outside. Trucks lurking around the perimeter, weapons left haphazard atop crates. She hadn’t lingered for long.

She’d only had to run half a mile before the headlights of Mary May’s truck cut through the early morning darkness. Staci had found her abandoned station wagon along the side of the road, called Mary May at the Spread Eagle. Fawn rocks back, takes a last hit of her joint, then ashes it on the desk. She shivers again. It had been toward the end of their trip back to Fall’s End when Fawn thought to ask how Mary May had found her. How she’d known to go straight for John’s ranch. Fawn glances back toward the kitchen, listens to the sound of Mary May digging around in the pantry. She knows now why that had been the first place Mary May thought to look. Fawn sniffs again, wiping at her cheeks, her skin tight from her tears.

The tattoo was shaky. _I struggled,_ Mary May told her, running her fingers over the tender, still reddened skin of her ribs, _that’s why it looks like this. John_ couldn’t keep her still. As he’d held her down on the dirty floor in Joseph’s chapel, as he tattooed _envy_ into her skin. Fawn takes a shaky breath, leans down to knead at her temples. It had been before Fawn ever set foot in Montana, before she had ever laid eyes on John Seed. The same hands that had been inside of her, that had been all over her body, had done that. And probably more. She can’t stop thinking about that man, bloodied and battered, outside the lumber mill. Can’t stop thinking about Holly Pepper, of the ghost ship of a house Fawn’s been living in for months. Her head aches, her whole body too, every part of her stretched too thin.

“I need you to do this.” Mary May’s voice startles her. Fawn doesn’t look back, but she can hear her come up behind the chair.

“I know.”

“They’re not gonna listen to me. They _haven’t_ listened to me. But they’ll listen to you.”

Fawn shakes her head, frowning. “They might.”

“They _will_. Because people who matter know your name. They’ll listen.” 

Fawn’s eyes flutter, her jaw tight. “I _know._ ”

Mary May squeezes her shoulders. “He is going to hurt you if you don’t. Worse than he hurt me.” Fawn swallows hard. Mary May knows some, but not all. She doesn’t know the most crucial parts. Though she seems to be piecing them together. “Because he _wants_ you. He never wanted me. It was never like that. I just kicked the hornet’s nest. But he’ll hurt you all the same.” And that has to be true. The bruise blooming on her skin should be proof of that, even if the memories of that soft bed are not. He’d dragged her across that field like a whupped dog. He’s _already_ hurt her.

Fawn doesn’t know then, as she reaches for the phone, why she feels like such a traitor. Mary May settles against the desk, an unreadable expression on her face. Fawn dials the number; Mary May stares at the wall. Fawn straightens up when a man answers on the other line, puts on her best. newsroom voice. “Good evening. My name is Fawn Honeychurch. I’m a reporter with the New York Times and I…” She reaches for her folder, her fingertips ghosting over the edges of those papers, all her work. “I have information regarding a possible crime.” Mary May’s jaw tightens. “Potentially a whole series of crimes.”

Whitehorse looks like he wants to throttle her. Which she expected. But what she hadn’t expected is the fear she sees in his eyes as he takes her folder, sets it down on the front desk at the station. The fear echoes through the room, writ large on every other person there. Whitehorse sniffs, adjusts his belt buckle. “I would have preferred if you hadn’t gone over our heads on this.”

“You stopped taking my calls.”

Whitehorse sighs, nodding. “Well then, I suppose I should have expected it to come down the pipeline eventually.” He adjusts his cowboy hart, then nods at Staci. “Pratt.” Staci goes rigid, nodding stiffly at Whitehorse. “Would you be so kind as to escort our friend here back to her car.”

Fawn glances from Whitehorse to Staci and back. “What?”

“This is officially police business now, Miss Honeychurch. Especially with the feds involved. I’m sure a Marshall will be in touch with you to return your property once they’ve taken a hard look at it.”

Fawn wavers, has half a mind to pull the folder right off his desk. _Fuck you. Fuck all of you._ Her head is still throbbing and some part of her wonders if she is still in that field. Maybe there’s a part of her that wishes she was. Even retching on the side of the road, she’d felt a dark certainty with John nearby. Staci’s hand is warm on her shoulder. He nods toward the door. She lets him lead her out.

There’s that chill in the air again. The one that shouldn’t be here, not in August and Fawn pulls her light jacket closer around her. Just a windbreaker. It’s not really enough. She’s still shivering, hasn’t really stopped since she woke up in John Seed’s bed.

The stars are brilliant tonight, swirling above them as she and Staci head out into the parking lot. “You look like shit.” He says, arms crossed over his chest.

Fawn manages an honest to god laugh. “Thanks. Appreciate it.” She opens the door of her station wagon, but just plops down in the seat, feet still firmly planted on the asphalt. She doesn’t really want to leave yet, isn’t really sure where the hell she even wants to go.

One side of Staci’s mouth ticks up, but it’s fleeting. He’s looking out into the darkness, that same fear she’d seen on Whitehorse. settling quietly over him. He looks over at her. “You okay?” Fawn just shrugs. Staci nods, looking back out across the parking lot. He glances over his shoulder at the station, then again at her. Staci looks tired, weary. Fawn feels it, slumps her shoulders a little. “Do you have any idea what you’ve just done?”

“No.”

Staci scoffs. “Yeah, me either.” He swallows hard, resting his forearm on top of her open car door. The light from the station’s open door spills out onto the parking lot’s cracked asphalt. He clears his throat. “You got my number, right?”

She raises a weak eyebrow. “Yeah.”

Staci takes another deep breath, then pats her door before stepping back. “Call it if you need it.”

Fawn nods, her hands clasped between her knees. Staci nods too, then turns on his heel and starts back toward the station. “Hey!” He pauses, half turning to look at her. “What do you think’s going to happen?” She nods toward the station. People are congregating now in the front room, Fawn spots a couple female deputies lingering over by the entrance. “What are you planning for?”

Staci takes a deep breath, stuffing his hand into the pockets of his jeans. “I’m not really sure.” He looks again at the dark highway. “Take care of yourself.”

The porch feels like the beginning and end of her world. She’s in the same ratty t-shirt. Barefoot again, her bare legs prickling under the cool night air. Fawn rolls the very last of her weed into a joint, watches as the smoke plumes against the night sky. She tries not to feel anything, tries not to think anything. It isn’t hard. The day has made her gutted and numb and it’s easy to stare out at the darkness beyond her porch light. There’s something final about it tonight, though, something dense, like the light from her house is just barely keeping it at bay. She toes the edge of it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading <3\. We're now approaching the beginning of the game in the timeline and things are going to get...more intense, so mind the tags going forward.


	23. September 1st, 2019. Just before dawn.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi guys. Long time no see. Been a crazy few months, yeah? But I hope to be updating a little more regularly now. I hope all of you are hanging in the best you can. 
> 
> Just a quick reminder that this fic contains graphic descriptions of violence and centers around some real fucked up love. Take care of yourselves <3

She’s done this before. Once. A long time ago. But the old rhythm is easy to slip into. It’s easy to feel young and afraid. To let every piece of the person she built for herself in New York, the person she’d risen so carefully into, fall away. That’s the point, she knows. Fawn’s read the book. Cover to cover. Over and over, bent nearly in half at Holly Pepper’s kitchen table, a cup of that foul instant coffee going cold beside her. It’s the kind of book that works better in practice, she’s finding. A little limp in structure, razor sharp in execution. Fawn’s foot catches on a rock. She cries out. Beams of light slip through the trees at the sound.

It’s a little different. This time. Fawn hasn’t slept. Spent most of the night and the waning hours of early morning watching the inky darkness recede from her front porch, waiting for some sign, any indication at all that the rock she’d tossed into the simmering water of Hope County was sending ripples out toward her. It hadn’t come like she’d been expecting. These things, she knows, rarely do. Brambles catch on her jeans, sending Fawn twisting toward the wide base of a pine, her palms landing hard on the gnarled surface. The shouting behind her ebbs and Fawn holds her breath. They’re listening for her and the sound of her breathing, the sound of her heart pounding at the base of her throat, are as loud as she’s ever heard them. Time passes like an echo. A bird calls from a tall branch. Fawn reaches slowly for her jeans, her fingers working to free the bramble from the denim. She can feel a dark stickiness spreading across her knuckles, her palm, as she works blindly to free herself. The scent of overripe blackberries fills the air and when the bramble comes undone, the branch whips loudly back, the sound echoing through the undergrowth. Their shouting resumes, louder now, and Fawn runs. No direction, no sense at all where she is going, where she’s come from. She runs. Her hands reaching blindly out in front of her, a scream caught between her teeth.

She hasn’t slept. Not last night. But not well since she got here either. Nothing like the deep, dreamless sleep in her New York apartment. The buffeting of her fan kept those old dreams away. A fan in every room. The nights are cavernous here. There’s so much space, so much room. The providence of those old dreams has come slipping into her reality; her reality has come thundering onto its side. Unrecognizable. Impossible to untangle.

It had been sand back then. Quick, cold water nipping at her ankles. The smell of salt in the air, of ocean rot. Here everything smells like pine, like sap, like gunpowder. The earth gives way to rock, sharp branches whipping her arms. The metallic, earthy smell of her own blood reminds her of John. And the thought of John Seed, of the sins carved into his fingers, his skin, makes her cry out again. Those beams of light skittering toward her, cascading over ferns and brush and fallen stumps. Fawn ducks into the dark shadow of a tree 

That day, the one she’s spent so many years, so many hundreds of dollars in therapy, to try and forget, was foggy. She hadn’t been able to see past her own hand, hadn’t been able to see the ocean, though she could hear the waves lapping at the sand. And she couldn’t see them, the faces she’d tried so long and hard to carve from her memory. But she could hear them. Those wet, coarse sounds had risen blindly up behind her, a quiet whimpering, a begging that some mornings would pull her hard and fast from her dreams. She’d watched that starfish unfurl, watch it twitch in the wet, open air, and had been sure, in the way only children can be, that she was going to die.

Fawn crawls on her hands and knees away from the sound of them. The rocks cut at her palms, low-hanging branches tangling in her hair. She can hear heavy boots crunching through the undergrowth and she is sure, in the way only a place like this can make her, that she is going to die.

She’d heard the first crackle over the radio from the front porch. Blanketed by all the weed she’d smoked and the cool night air, it had still cut right through her. Left a seed of dread so heavy she’d held a hand to her chest as she ventured back inside the house like she could soothe it. The police scanner had been an impulse buy after her day at Dutch’s bunker. Bought from the same place she bought her dusty, barely functional router. She kept it on almost all the time, would fall asleep some nights to the sound of the chatter. Fawn doesn’t remember what Staci said, his voice distorted, almost other-worldly but she remembers the way that seed of dread cut sharply through her.

The trucks came soon after that. All those disembodied sounds she’d been listening to for months suddenly made flesh, parked haphazardly along her muddy drive. The sound of voices, of boots on the ground, heavy, metallic thunks. She’d gone out through the window. An old trick. Practically a reflex.

The gunfire pulls her hard out of her thoughts. Two shots, one after the other and then the clatter of laughter. The sounds are slow, caught in the air, the steam of her breath billowing into the darkness. It feels like it had in that field and the memory of John’s fingers on her skin echoes across her. She nearly stands, nearly heads toward the source of the sound. Spent and done and dreamy. A bullet chips the bark of a nearby tree and Fawn slams back into her body. She bites hard down on her hand, strangling the scream that rushes up inside of her. Another bullet. This one skittering across a patch of ferns, a spark glimmering in the darkness. Fawn stands. She runs.

It’s in the earliest hours of the morning when she makes it to Fall’s End, propelled by an almost supernatural sense of direction, an animal desperation, that coalesces into a pure, aching relief as the neon from the Spread Eagle’s sign comes into view. The stars glimmer in the moonless sky, the flashlights of the people who have gathered bob like fireflies amongst the clapboard buildings.

Fawn heads stiffly down the street, one leg of her jeans wet and tacky from the brambles, from her own blood. She passes a group of men building barricades beside the churchyard. They don’t look at her, save for one who glances up, a look of such pristine horror on his face that the air seems to slow around him. Fawn leaves him, continues down toward the center of the town. It’s the same and it isn’t. Another echo. Another thing bent and strange and unreal. Another thing that had been fine only a few hours ago. They are pulling doors off their hinges; they are counting bullets on the bottom step of the church. It all feels thick like a dream. Like all her dreams have here. Wading through water, stumbling away or toward something so vague and intangible but something so important her brain circles back again and again. And this feels, as she closes in on the Spread Eagle, like the dreams’ long crescendo. But the air is cold in her lungs and her cut leg hurts in a real, corporeal way that frightens her. Mary May comes out to stand on the bar’s porch. She cocks a shotgun, the sound clean and crisp and so absolutely fucking terrifying that Fawn stumbles. There is shouting, a rising din all around her, and that zing in the air like a coming storm. Fawn rubs her eyes. Then rubs them harder, digging the heel of her palm into her sockets.

She isn’t sure what makes her turn around. Doesn’t hear a sound really, just turns back to look over the church steps and finds those same trucks she’d seen idling outside her house waiting now just outside the barricade. She turns around and finds more at the mouth on the other side of town. Her brain is slow, barely understanding, grasping for some clue that this is all a dream, some awful, awful nightmare. But her body is up to speed. Goosebumps race up her bare arms, her heart pounding again in her throat. “Get down!” Mary May’s voice cuts through the din, clear as a bell. Fawn blinks at her, barely understanding. Her golden hair has fallen mostly out of her ponytail, eyes clear and hard. She looks at Fawn. “ _Get down._ ” The bullet passes so close she can feel the heat of it on her cheek. She hits the asphalt hard.

It’s over before it begins. They’re overrun. Like in a movie, like in some old medieval story. _Overrun_. Cultists pouring over the barricades. Shouting and screaming and gunfire so loud it makes Fawn’s ears ache. And then just the slow crackle of fire. And then his voice.

They have her bent over by the Spread Eagle. Resting on her knees, hands tied roughly at her back, head bowed like she’s seen so many times on the news. In other places, during other wars. And John is speaking. His voice strong and clear, only slightly distorted through the speakers they’ve hung with a robotic efficiency around the town. He’s talking about sin, about salvation, and Fawn is remembering the way he’d curled the seven sins around her throat, the warmth of his body heavy and tranquilizing between her thighs. She can hear Mary May in the distance, shouting and cursing, and the white-hot panic that rolls through Fawn is enough to send her tipping over, coughing, bile threatening at the base of her throat. She scrambles to stay upright, to wriggle out of the zipties digging into her wrists. Fawn’s halfway to standing when the man beside her notices what she’s doing. He stills, gun cradled in both hands, then sets it almost tenderly down on the bar’s porch railing. Then, with glossy eyes, he hits her hard across the jaw with his closed fist. Fawn rocks back on her haunches, hair flying through the air as she falls. It feels like coming home. Like childhood. Like every real thing she’s ever known. And she thinks, as she tastes the metallic of her own blood, of the things John carved into his skin, of those faint scars above the others. Older, quieter. A pain that he had taken and made loud, made physical, undeniable. His voice echoes through the speakers. _The way to salvation is through the Father and the Father alone,_ he says, _all you have to do is say yes._ Fawn braces herself for the second blow, but it never comes. She opens her eyes to find that another of the cultists has taken hold of the man’s hand. “Not her,” he says with a quick nod in her direction, “she’s special.”

The other man snorts, yanking his hand away. Fawn recognizes him. From the bar. That fucking symbol tattooed at his third eye. She remembers, suddenly, violently, drawing it on a cocktail napkin on the plane to Denver. Time collapses. All she can smell is smoke.

He wipes at his mouth, sniffing. “Doesn’t look special to me.” He pauses, just for a single second. Long enough for Fawn to see that his eyes are hazel, that they’re rimmed in gold. And then he wails on her. Beats her like a fucking dog. Blow after blow after blow until her vision blurs, her mouth fills with blood. It’s been a long time, and Fawn’s not sure it was ever quite like this, but her body knows the score. It shuts off inch by inch until she lays numb on the ground. He doesn’t let up, even when she goes still. In the distance, Mary May is _screaming._

It’s the slow crawl of dawn when they bring them all to the center of the road. Peaceful. Almost. The town is quiet now, just the calls of birds from far off trees, an early morning breeze through the chimes on the porch of the general store. The crackling fires are quieter now, gunfire gone. The stars blink off against the pale blue of the sky, a steady warmth from the rising run spilling over the treeline. It feels almost soft to be dragged across the dirt, across the cracked asphalt. Her clothes stuck to her by sweat and blood, her head pounding at her temples. The men pull her across a dark stain of blood spreading out into the dirt. She turns to look, following it to its end. They’re stacking corpses over by the general store, slow and careful like a ritual. They look like little mannequins. Or maybe she just can’t process that they aren’t. That they’re people. Were people. Maybe the same ones she stood across the grill from on the Fourth of July. Dead now, stacked row by row, up against the side of the building like firewood. And for what? She doesn’t know what she expected when she made the call. It wasn’t this. It was nothing like this. John’s voice drones on about sin, about salvation. Louder now that they’re closer to the center of the road.

There’s smoke rising from the church, black as char. And the air smells like blood, like nothing she’s ever smelled in her life. Fawn sniffles, wet blood pouring down her throat. She coughs it onto her shirt, already dark with it. Her lip’s numb. It feels two sizes too big.

They shove her hard down onto the road, arranging her so she’s kneeling again, arms still tied behind her. They drop Mary May beside her. Fawn glances over. She’s breathing heavy. Red in the face but looks mostly unhurt. Tears run rivers down her filthy cheeks. Fawn reaches over, twisting her body so she can brush her fingers against Mary May’s hand. Mary May takes hold of her, and when a truck comes to a screeching halt in front of them, she squeezes her fingers hard before releasing them. Fawn rocks back, feeling suddenly more adrift than she has in her entire life. Alone in every single sense of the word.

The door of this new truck slams and all of the people kneeling now in the road flinch at once. Fawn knows it’s him without looking up, before he even opens his mouth. She needs no confirmation. Feels, deliriously, like they are somehow tied. She will always follow him; he will always follow her. It makes no sense. Her thoughts tilt. “This,” he says, his cowboy boots kicking up dust as he comes to stand in front of them, “is the real power of yes.” She keeps her head down, staring at the broken road, the blood dripping from her mouth mixes with the dirt, the chipped white paint of the median line. “You don’t have to say it. We’ve taken that burden from you.” The recording of his voice is still playing through the speakers, an eerie echo, a double. “This is the will of the Father.” There’s nothing soft in John’s voice, nothing warm. None of those bare glimpses of a human being Fawn got in her moments alone with him. He is now the man that Mary May warned her about, that chiaroscuro face on the billboards. And nothing more. “This is the will of _God_ and-“ He stops, his words dying on his tongue. Fawn shivers, still can’t bring herself to look up even as she hears his boots approaching. She stays staring at the ground, shivering like a little animal. And then she sees the toes of his boots, only a few inches from her bent knees. Her eyes flit up, find jeans caked wet with blood. She remembers the taste of his fingers in her mouth, trembles at the thought. The silence swells around them and when John next speaks, he has lost the flair in his voice. All Fawn can hear is malice. “Who did this?” His voice rises. “Who brought her here?” The silence deepens and John’s voice has almost hysterical trill in it now. “Who? Hmm?”

“It was me, brother John.” Fawn hears the sound of approaching footsteps, a hush so full of meaning that all the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. 

“You?” But John doesn’t give him time to answer before Fawn hears a loud crack. The man cries out, landing beside her on the dusty road. He’s holding his face, rocking side to side, blood pouring from between his fingers. Fawn looks finally up, finds John tucking a pistol into the waist of his jeans, wiping a smear of blood onto his belt. “Follow my instructions next time.” The man groans and when he removes his hands, Fawn can see that his nose is broken, the tip nearly touching his cheek. She swallows bile. John takes a deep breath, his fingers pressed to the bridge of his nose, then he stands, surging forward to grab Fawn by the collar. She cries out, Mary May squirming angrily beside her. “Take the rest of them to the cleansing. _Now._ ” There’s a chorus of shouting, struggling, but Fawn can barely hear it. John’s half dragging, half carrying her over to the truck. He pushes her hard against the side of it, nostrils flaring before he takes her jaw in his hand.

The touch makes pain shoot up to her temples and she grabs weakly at him. “John.”

He tightens his grip. “Quiet.” Fawn lets herself go slack against the cold metal of the car. His fingers soften and something almost tender passes over his eyes before it fizzles out. He moves her head one way, then the other, tsking before he finally releases her. “They were not supposed to do this.”

Fawn manages a weak laugh, blood spraying onto her lips. “What the fuck is happening, John?”

“The reaping.” He glances off toward the line of trucks, leans over to open the passenger door.

“The _reaping_.” Fawn sniffles. “Why are you doing this John? You don’t have to fucking do this.”

He looks at her, his eyes the color of tidepools, of ocean foam. “It’s the will of the Father.”

“No.” He grabs her shoulder and she uses every last ounces of strength she has to try and buck him off. “ _No_ , John. None of this has to happen!” He ignores her, dragging her along toward the open door. “John! Listen to me, John! None of this shit has to fucking happen!” He hefts her into the seat and slams the door. She bangs her fists on the window. He doesn’t even spare a glance back.

Her breath is loud in the cocoon of the car. The leather seats and shiny interior so out of place with everything’s that just happened she wonders again if this is a dream. But John is back before the thought sticks, animal malice wafting off him. He swings himself into the driver’s seat then leans over, pulling her roughly over by her bound wrists. She can feel the blade of his knife on her wrists, knows better now than to struggle. The movement is quick, the blade nicking the tender skin beside her thumb as it releases her. He exhales hot at the base of her neck when she cries out, brushes his thumb across the new blood, then pushes her again into the seat. Fawn slumps like a doll. Her body feels heavy, brain fuzzy. The truck comes roaring to life, the radio with it. The singing is barely more than a whisper, like an itch in the back of her brain. An echo, like it’s been recorded in a drafty room. “Where are you taking them?” Fawn tries to lift herself up off the seat, but her body is fighting her now, sinking. “Where are you taking me?” John turns the radio up, lets it fill the car until Fawn’s thoughts drift, her hazy brain losing focus. She reaches for him. He’s warm to the touch, slick with blood.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much for reading <3


	24. September 1st, 2019. Early evening.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi guys. Long time no update. This fic has a really special place in my heart and I got kinda stuck on this chapter (like several months stuck lol), but I’ve finally written it in a way I am (mostly) happy with. So I really hope you enjoy and thank you so much for your patience <3 . I do have the rest of this fic all outlined and mostly drafted so I’m hoping (maybe optimistically) to have much more frequent updates (ideally a new chapter every other week). 
> 
> Also: a quick reminder to mind the tags. Shit is gonna get violent and fucked up 
> 
> tw: graphic description of drowning

The horizon bobs. A long line of red and Fawn isn’t sure if she’s ever seen a sunset look like that, like a pool of blood come shepherding in the night. The truck smells like it. Salty, metallic. It’s sticky on her palms, between her fingers.

They’re headed further into the Valley, the mountains at their back. The setting sun casts the whole cab in orange and when Fawn looks over at him, John looks, briefly, like he’s been set aflame. He doesn’t turn, knuckles white on the wheel, but she can tell by the way a tendon jumps in his neck that he’s noticed her looking. Her brain is too hazy to make out what he says to her then, just the low sound of his voice over the roar of the engine as he speeds them down the road, but when she tips her head back, temples pounding, he comes rushing up, ghosts of his fingertips along her thighs. A pop of memory that is and isn’t the man beside her. Her room, back at Holly Pepper’s place, filled up with golden light. Suspended again in the quiet, frantic, thoughtless feeling of him inside her. The softest John she knows. The one beside her, leaned forward toward the dash, mouth tight, his darker half. All sharp edges. The energy wafting off him so intense it prickles along her skin. He has dark blood caked along each knuckle. They fizzle together, her memories of him. The John panting between her thighs becomes the John standing outside of her house, boots slick with mud, the darkness at his back so complete it slithers over his shoulders. The horizon wobbles, her memories breaking apart like waves scattering on sand. Fawn feels John take a sharp turn, feels the tires on her side catch air. The waves of her memory break again across her body and she can see him beside her and also there, in front of her, standing between the gas station’s aisles, the frozen, neutered skin of a lemon heavy in her hand. He’s on the side of every road she’s ever been down, waiting just where the asphalt meets the earth. He’s there in the half glow of the city through her old office’s windows. His hands on her shoulders, face halved in the reflection of her laptop’s screen.

The impact sends every version of him slamming back into the driver’s seat. She watches him buck toward the windshield. Fawn feels glass scatter across her lap, feels herself lift off from the seat, hair flying, heart jumping.

She comes to on the asphalt, follows a dark line of her own blood across the creaking, narrow bridge to where John’s truck lays on its side, smoking, oil dripping down the exposed metal of its undercarriage. Beside it, another car, wheels spinning. She can feel how close she is to the edge of the bridge, feet dangling, open air cool on her skin. Fawn doesn’t see John in the wreckage, can’t hear anything except the roaring in her own ears. And the idea that he is maybe dead, gone, ignites both relief and terror inside of her. That sort of sick longing that, even here, sprawled out onto the road, fills her with sharp shame. Hellish, all of it. These last months, these last days, her own thoughts. It feels less and less real and as Fawn struggles to prop herself up on her arms, she’s sure it’s a dream. Maybe all of it. Some sick amalgamation of everything she’s ever wanted and everything she’s ever been afraid of. And she’ll wake up, cheek pressed to her kitchen table, work spread out around her, neighbors bickering in the hallway just outside her door. Surely, _surely._

But the roaring in her ears begins to ebb, replaced with the sound creaking metal, a single shout. And then there he is, prying himself from the truck, landing on his feet. Fawn wonders, blearily, how and when he gained the cockroaches’ trait of infinity.

He wavers, briefly unsteady, and in that split second where it seems like he might too collapse, all Fawn can feel is incredible fear. The kind that arcs through her. Mary May had screamed so long she went hoarse, until it faded and all they could hear was John’s voice tripled in the air. Droning from the speakers, shouting over the crowd, whispering in Fawn’s own head. Dangerous, she’d been told. Dangerous, she’d seen with her own two eyes. Softened by those pretty blue eyes and easy Southern lawyer’s charm. There is no softness here in the road. He looks feral, soaked in blood, bent over like an animal.

It’s a decision and it isn’t. An animal instinct; an act of incredible self-loathing; a desperate escape. Fawn edges back toward where her feet hang, eyes closed. She can hear him calling her name. Over and over, in time to the beating of her heart. Falling feels like a long exhale. She sees the legs of a starfish unfurl in her mind. The water hits like a brick.

The river rocks cut but Fawn finds herself clawing desperately for them, her fingers raw on their sharp edges. She watches them pass her, sinking like a stone. The water calm and still around her even as she can see the river rush above her head.

Her last breath before the drop grows heavy in her lungs, fills her whole chest until it feels like her ribs are going to crack open. Water in, air out. An even exchange. Fawn’s body moves on instinct, rioting against her cooling thoughts. Hands clawing uselessly through the heavy water, legs kicking but getting nowhere. Her lungs pulse, throbbing, until her whole body throbs in time and a howling, childlike fear opens up inside of her. A feeling like grief at the ever-widening distance between the watery outline of the bridge above and her own outstretched hands. Death feels close and bright and unfair, but the fear is drifting off. The seconds pass like long dreams. She can hear the soft blading of the fan in her old apartment in New York, feel that recycled air; the wet morning smell in the mornings at the house here, her bare toes gripping the sun-warmed wood of the porch.

And then her ears pop. Painful and loud and she opens her mouth without thinking and all the air comes rushing out of her chest. She watches the bubbles drift upward and realizes, with a stark horror, just how far she’s sunk. Fawn gulps for air and finds only water, grit. The pressure is agony. Her lungs, her head. She feels like she might come apart at the seams.

She hits the bottom with a quiet softness. It’s curved up, this rocky slope, toward the bank of the river. She could climb it, climb her way back up to the surface, but just the idea of it makes her dizzy and so she lets herself sink into the sediment. Lights pop in her peripheries, turn to a pulsing darkness that threatens to spread. A fish swims past her, slowing, curious, and she reaches for it, its scales glinting in the watery light. They feel soft on her fingertips, pleasant and she feels a quick jealousy for the vital way it moves. She can’t bend her fingers, just lets them drift in the water, and she wonders, vaguely, where John is. If he came in after her.

Everything hurts. Every joint, every muscle. The room is filled with only dim light but Fawn still lifts her hand to shield her eyes from it. There’s a deep, reddened groove across her wrist and she frowns at it, confused. And then, with a sharp intake of breath, her brain clicks back in with her body. The zip ties. Her nose filled with blood and dirt, bent down onto the soil. Mary May’s hoarse voice. The thoughts give her vertigo. She closes her eyes and tries to let the feeling subside, to try and pull herself the fuck together. “I should have let you drown.” Fawn’s eyes fly back open. The air is thick with the smell of cigarettes, wet leather, plastic. She hadn’t noticed before. A rookie mistake. No idea where the fuck she even is. She can hear a clanking sound, like an old radiator, and a quieter sound, like a radio in another room. “For the amount of trouble you’ve caused, that might’ve been fair.” Fawn turns, lifting her heavy head to find Dutch rising from his chair. He flicks the dregs of a still-lit cigarette onto the concrete floor. He doesn’t look at her, just heads away toward a narrow hall, jerks his head at a row of lockers. “Dry clothes. Put ‘em on when your head stops spinning.” He glances back at her. “And come take a look at the hell you brought down on us.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading <3


	25. Sometime early September

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a quick reminder to mind the tags. Take care of yourselves <3

The clothes are too big for her, but they’re dry and there’s some animal part of her, soft and scared, that clings tightly to the sense of equilibrium that gives her. She can still smell the river in her hair. She might as well be at the bottom of it. Dutch’s bunker, she knows after hours scrolling through prepper sites with her flickering internet, is probably about as deep. She can almost feel its echo, the rush of the water above her, the stillness as she sank. Can feel it like it’s drifting toward her, the walls of the bunker no protection at all. At least that’s where she assumes she is. Dutch’s bunker. Can’t think of another place that would look like this, all metal and concrete, a ceiling so low she can almost reach up and touch it. Her hands ache. The grooves where the zipties tightened around her wrists inflamed now. She turns her palms up, her skin wrinkled from the water. She wonders, still, if John went in after her.

Dutch doesn’t look up, but Fawn can feel his hackles raise as she slips into the room. It wasn’t easy to find him. She wandered through rooms, drifted down the long hallways quiet as a crypt. The only sound her own footsteps and an ambient static from the radio a trail that she followed almost blindly. His shoulders tense up when she sighs. The air is thick, humid. Chilled. Somehow all at once. “No signal,” Dutch says, mostly to himself, “probably not anywhere in the whole county.”

Fawn wavers in the doorway. The room feels dense, crowded. Boxes stacked on boxes; thick industrial shelves heavy with clutter. Canned goods and jugs of water. Bullets. There’s a shotgun on the table beside her, a pistol underneath it. On the far wall, just papers. Tacked haphazardly up, overlapping, edges curling inward. Dutch is bent over a radio so thick with dust that she can smell it burning. It gives off its own heat. Beads of sweat roll down his scalp, his arms. A wall of old monitors blink static like an aura around him. The light hurts Fawn’s eyes. “How is that even possible?”

Dutch doesn’t answer, just nods to the clutter beside him. “Cup of coffee. Probably need it.”

It’s cold but Fawn still clings to it, granules of powdered milk stuck to the lip of the tin mug. The kind you use for camping. A little dented on one side. There are no chairs in the room, so she perches herself up on the far table, the papers on the wall crinkling against her back. Her face throbs head a little woozy like it still needs more air, lights popping in her peripheries like they had in the chapel, in the field. She should probably try to make sense of that. Her head’s too heavy.

Fawn runs her thumb along the lip of the mug. All camping dishes are sort of the same she thinks and like the thought strikes a match, her memories crowd her. The smell of cedar and pinyon; distant salt of the ocean. Pit smoke, gun smoke. Laughter and tense whispers. A shout that echoes away. The tent rustling, a hand come slipping into her sleeping bag, the soft sound of a zipper. Fawn sets the mug roughly down on the table, the clatter tripling in the quiet of the room. She kneads at her temples like she can force the memory out of her mind. Dutch glances over, the radio still nothing but empty air. “Yeah, I bet your head hurts. You went over like a girl with a death wish, hit the water like I ain’t never seen. Thought you’d break every bone in your body.” He clears his throat. “But maybe you do have a death wish.” He nods behind her. “Nobody in their right mind would come out here just for them.”

Fawn turns and finds herself, jarringly, sitting underneath a picture of John. She’s seen it before. Recognizes it from that first, short article that brought her out here in the first place. It’s from the shoulders up, the Whitetails at his back, bathed in sunlight, dressed in the kind of cowboy embroidered button-down she’s never seen him wear in person. It looks nothing like him and everything like him. Like he’s caught between menace and charm, like the photographer has captured a moment of transformation that Fawn has only seen all at once, too quick to even process. She can’t look at it anymore, follows the string that Dutch has tacked along the wall. To a picture of an office building, windows opaque and gleaming in the sun. To a map of Athens, Georgia, a thick circle drawn clean in the middle. To a mugshot. Of Joseph. Fawn narrows her eyes at it, gears turning in her head. He looks young. Hair cropped close to his temples, a watery, fearful look in his eye. He only looks a little older than he had in that first picture she’d seen on him, the one with his pregnant wife. What happened to her, Fawn thinks, must be so much worse than she’d even imagined. She looks up, finds the smeared print of Jacob’s discharge paperwork, John’s bar certification. Fawn looks over at Dutch, still bent over the radio. “You have a lot on them.” He just grunts. “More than I did. _Way_ more than I did.” Silence, just the churn of the useless radio. Fawn frowns, suddenly brimming with energy. “We could have collaborated! We could have helped each other!”

“No.” Dutch turns to face her full on and she flinches away from the look on his face. “No, we could not have.” Fawn swallows, the sound loud in her ears. “I didn’t want your help and this town certainly didn’t need it.” Dutch sniffs, pushing his glasses a little up his nose. “But I don’t have much choice now, do I?” His mouth is a tight line. “You feeling like you can walk on your own two feet?”

Fawn isn’t feeling much of anything. Just a sort of quiet numbness that has settled so easily inside of her. An old impulse, a well-worn groove. It’s easy to slip inside herself, to retreat to the back of the house in her mind, the porch light still on but flickering. “I’m fine.”

Dutch eyes her. “Go to Fall’s End.” She blinks at him. “See if you can find anybody down there. See if you can find a working radio, a working phone. Anything.”

“Why me?”

“Because I’m too old to be traipsing around these hills. And you’re the best I’ve got.”

And then it dawns on her. Like a bolt of panic, awake now, all the lights in the house on again. Her body aching, _aching._ “Have you heard from Mary May?”

“I haven’t heard from fucking anybody. Why the hell you think I’m asking you to go out there?”

Fawn feels chilled, suddenly cornered. Her wrists throb. “Why the hell would I go out there? They’re _killing_ people out there.”

“Because you owe me.” Fawn swallows hard. “I ain’t asking you to play Rambo. I’m asking you to have a look-see. Reporters are sneaky shits. Use it for good for once in your life.” Fawn bristles. “Just tell me what the fuck we’re dealing with out there. And I’ll see what I can do about those towers.”

It’s a beautiful day. Warm. Not a cloud in the sky. A brilliant, postcard blue. Water so clear she can see to the rocky bottom, finds herself searching over the edge of her kayak. For herself. Hair spread out like sea grass along the rocks, lips blue and quiet. But she’s here, in her own body, still alive as far as she can tell and there’s smoke rising from the treeline in all directions. She lifts herself out onto the shore when the kayak bumps the edge, every part of her aching, One the top of the ridge, outlined by trees, Fawn spots a truck on the side of the road. It’s running, she finds as she makes her way closer, the engine rumbling, open door dinging. She imagines herself slipping behind the wheel and just driving. South. Until she gets somewhere real. Finds an airport. Runs home. She imagines herself running into Adam on the sidewalk outside the Times’ offices. _I have the wildest story to tell you. I had the craziest dream._ The steering wheel is warm to the touch. Like the driver was just there, just holding it. The road is empty. Not even the birds are singing. Her vision wobbles then right itself. The sickly sweet smell of rot in the air. There’d been a softness in Mary May’s eyes that night on the roof, fireworks popping in the darkness of her pupils. Fawn’s tab must be three figures by now. Maybe more. All that beer. All those plates of fries. Casey laughing about her eating them in bunches. The warm sound of the radio in Mary May’s truck. Then distorted, that faint hum, that melody she can’t quite place. He fucked her with avarice and pride. She can remember watching him between her legs, watching his fingers, expecting to see the sins gone when he pulled them from her, marking her insides with ink. _You are my end times._ Fawn’s head throbs. She shuts the truck’s door. The sound echoes down the road

She stops for a moment, mud on her shoes, the sun too bright and hot now that it’s high in the sky, and wonders why they would have taken the time to board up the Spread Eagle. Neatly too. Boards fitted to the windows; nails spaced evenly apart. There’s blood from the door to the middle of the street. A dried, dark blot. A stain that Fawn spades under inside of herself. It all feels like a dream. All those starry nights on this porch, softened by beer and smiling. John and the darkness churning inside of him. The darkness he’d excavated inside of her. The end, kneeling in the dirt, a strange twist in her subconscious, a blip in her rem. Fawn blinks once, twice. She’ll wake up on the plane to Denver, face pressed to the napkin where she’d drawn the symbol. She’ll wake up in her apartment, fan’s white noise blading over her body. She’ll wake up in California, low hanging lemons out her window, rumbled sheets. She’ll wake up on shag carpet, a rattle in her ears, cold hand clutched in her own. A door creaks across the road and Fawn seizes. But it’s only the wind. She rubs at her eyes. Closes them. Listens. There’s nothing. The town is quiet. And she should go back and tell Dutch that but instead she hoists herself up on the bar’s railing, steadies her hands on the low slope of the roof. Her mind feels clear in an instant, everything snapping into place. Enough about dreams, about longing, about John. She pulls herself up onto the shingles and decides that dying out in nowhere, Montana isn’t the course of action she’s going to take. If she’s alive then Mary May is. If she escaped then Mary May did. Simple as that.

Fawn crawls across the roof toward her bedroom window. Maybe she left something. A clue. A plan of action. Maybe she’s hiding there. Maybe _she’s_ the one who boarded the windows. Fawn tried the window. Shut. Tight. She leverages back, gearing up to really put her back into it when the walkie crackles to life. “Fawn!” She jumps, loses her grip on it, watches it tumble off the roof. Fawn scrambles down after it, wincing as she lands.

She fusses with the walkie, trying to remember the way he’d showed her to use it. “Dutch?” Just static. “Dutch, did you get the towers up?”

“Fawn.” His voice comes through distorted. “John…over the radio….if you’re…Fall’s End.”

“I can’t hear you. You’re all broken up.”

“Go…chosen…out of there.” She frowns, examining the walkie, fussing with the volume. And then, just the ghost of a sound. Tires crunching slowly over the broken asphalt. Fawn freezes. The air thickens around her, the crackle of the walkie like a squeal. She runs. Not even thinking. Like prey. Runs toward the back of the bar and when she hears shouting, a round of gunshots, she ducks into the overgrown grass beside one of the houses. Her breath rattles around in her chest, every muscle in her body trembling. A betrayal. She can’t keep quiet, bites down on her own hand to keep herself from crying out. All the fear she’d tucked away inside herself spills over and she can feel the hot wetness of her own tears. Fawn can’t hear them anymore, can’t hear anything but her heart pounding in her ears. She closes her eyes. Can’t stand to look. Her thought jumble together. Water and sand, flowers opening, stretching toward the sun. The key around John’s neck. Had she ever wondered where it went to? Had she ever asked? Her fear rounds itself out, bursts inside of her, so ever present, so natural that when opens her eyes and finds the toe of a boot edged up against her curled fist, she feels nothing. The hand in her hair is almost comforting until it yanks her up, the sun bright again, everywhere. “God has delivered you unto us.” The flash of teeth in a smile. That symbol carved bloody between a pair of eyes. “And you will be delivered unto the water. You will be cleansed.” She remembers her dream, waist deep in that tepid pond. Fawn reaches up, finds the man’s wrist. The walkie squalls in the grass. “Such is the will of the Father.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I always sort of figured that if a normal, everyday person was ever put in a situation like a lot of the ones you find in the game they would, you know, immediately get captured lol. 
> 
> Thank you so much for reading <3


	26. Sometime early September

He says it again at the mouth of the trees. The night is clear and cold. Sky livid with stars. _The will of the father._ Shadows crowd them, their voices like echoes. _The father. The will of. The father. The father._ Fawn fights to keep up, her shoes catching rocks, undergrowth. Her knees give out but she catches herself, struggling to stay upright. The darkness is total. She can feel it inside herself, feel it expand in her lungs. And then it shatters in headlights. Two beams of light that come flooding across water, across the ground, ricochet through the heavy boughs of the pines. And there he is. John. Standing in the water, fully dressed, the beams skidding across his shoulders like wings. His arms are outstretched, that book in one hand. Open. Like a preacher. His voice booms, fills the air in the clearing. Sin, sin, always about sin now. And Fawn feels full of it. Sin and shame for the relief that cuts through her when she sees that it’s him. For the longing the crystalline water around his hips fills her with. She’d dreamt this once. Maybe. Wading on her hands and knees in tepid water, finding these headlights at the end. But the water here is freezing as they bring her to toe the edge. A woman cries out, the sound of a splash, and Fawn realizes that she is surrounded. Men coming out from the trees like ghosts, bent figures pulled between them. Their hands tied in front of them, some with their heads bound up in cloth. And then the panic sets in, the scene made suddenly real. And she remembers where she is, _who_ she is. Can see Mary May bent over in her mind’s eye, hands purpling from how tightly they’ve been tied at her back, just _screaming._ And that’s when she starts to struggle, realizing, slowly, that her hands aren’t tied. That she’s been dragged along this entire time just by her limp arms. And the movement draws his attention. And she goes still in his gaze. The whole clearing does. Silence save for a quiet whimpering near the truck. The water sloshes around him as he moves, glittering in the moonlight, in the headlights. Fawn smells that sweet rot, a shimmer that rises from the water as it ripples.

“We must atone.” His voice is smaller now away from the acoustics of the water, like it’s meant only for her. His eyes only on her. “For only then,” he shuts the book, hands it to one of the men standing near the trees, “may we stand in the light of God.” The headlights diffuse over his head, casting his face in darkness, blotting out everything behind him until he is the only thing Fawn can see. John lays a gentle hand on the man’s shoulder, inclines his head. “Thank you, brother. For finding her.” He releases the man and then Fawn can feel the heat of his full attention on her. And the way he grabs her feels inevitable, like coming home. That language of violence that she had run so far from, tried to pick piece by piece apart, back again. Natural almost, the way his fingers bruise across her shoulders. The chill in the water a shock as he leads her into it. Fawn clings to him. She can feel the echo of the river in her lungs and an animal terror has her struggling in his grip, desperate for dry land. His grip tightens, the tendons in his neck pulsing. When he speaks, it’s through his teeth. “Come Fawn, bear witness to the destruction you’ve caused.” On the shore, she can see a line of men, their heads shaven, eyes red like an echo of that woman in the pew. The air shimmers the same. At their feet: a woman. Sprawled out, a ballcap strewn nearby. Her blood darkening the sand, pink when it hits the water. It isn’t Mary May. It isn’t Mary May and suddenly that is all that matters. Fawn exhales, her breath shimmering too.

John pulls her away from the sight, turns her so they’re face to face. “What a suicidal little impulse of yours going off that bridge was. What sin is that, hmmm? Greed? Wrath?” His grip tightens, eyes aflame. “It doesn’t matter. Even if you had drowned, it wouldn’t matter. Our time on this Earth is short and growing shorter. I’d find you. Even in death.” His skin is so warm, _burning,_ even in the water and Fawn leans into it. Shame again. Bright and painful. John’s eyes flit down her body. He frowns. “Whose clothes are these?” And if she had it in her, Fawn might have laughed. Because she can see that quick spark of jealousy in his eyes. Because it’s just John. Not John the Baptist, not John in chiaroscuro above the highway, not even John the good ole boy Southern lawyer. Just John the man. John with his fingers inside of her, sweat slick on his skin. John with his hot breath against her neck. And she can deal with John the man. But he is fleeting. Eyes steely again, water sloshing as he moves them toward the center of it. His mouth a tight line, nostrils flaring. “I have forgiven your betrayal,” his eyes flit again down her body, “no matter how deep it may go. But you must be cleansed. Because you are _full_ of sin.” His voice is softer now, lips just barely parted. Aroused, she realizes, he’s aroused. “I will bare all of you. I will strip you clean.” His grip tightens and she feels him begin to push her down into the water. Her lungs tighten, that jackrabbit rhythm of her heart pounding again. “I will remake you in the image of pain.” His voice rises again. Louder and louder. That preacher tempo. “I will break you down _piece_ by _piece_ and you will emerge new! You will emerge pure!”

Fawn grabs at him, nails digging into his forearms. “John. John! Please don’t. Please, I-“ She exhales before the water. It tastes like salt, like copper. It tastes all wrong and then the fast whip of panic is on her and she tastes nothing at all. Fawn claws at him like a cat, screaming under the surface, but when he pulls her up again, she clings to him like a lover. His body is warm andsolid and she, head swimming, reaches desperately for him. His eyes soften and, for a moment, he seems unsure what to do next, but he must see something there. In her, on her. His eyes go hard with hatred, grip tightening. John tsks at her. “Oh no. I’m afraid it’ll take more than that to make you clean.”

Fawn shouts, struggling against him as he tries to push her back under. “John.” The air stills. A deep quiet settles in the clearing. Joseph emerges from between the twin beams of the truck. He’s shirtless now, jeans skimming low on his hips, and there’s a part of Fawn’s brain, a part still back in New York, that rushes to try and get a better look at the marks on his body, to try and understand. His chest falls into darkness as he steps into the water, the hem of his jeans darkening, He’s still, even in the dark of night, peering at them all through his sallow-colored glasses. “You are blinded by your impulses, John.” Joseph wades deeper into the water toward them and Fawn finds herself clinging tighter to John. “By your _sin._ Love cleanses what pain cannot. Remember that.” John’s whole body wilts, his head bowing. Joseph rests a hand on John’s shoulder, pushes him aside to bring himself closer to Fawn. She finds herself reaching for John, retracts her hand once she realizes that she’s doing it. Turns to Joseph, as if drawn, close enough that she can feel his breath, smell the liquor on it. An old fear resurfaces. A man out of his own mind. His lips are chapped, cracked in one corner. Fawn recoils, feels John’s hand tighten around her arm, holding her in place. “You are not here by accident or by chance. You are here by the grace of God.” Joseph looks over at the others in the water, his voice rising. A sermon now all over again, every eye trained on him. “You have brought hell down upon us. Malicious. _Sinful._ And yet you are forgiven in the eyes of God.” He lowers his voice, inclines his head, jaundiced eyes sliding over to look at John. “This one, John. This one is your responsibility. You will walk through the gates of Eden with her behind you or not at all.”

John’s head is still bowed, eyes still downcast. “Yes, Joseph.”

Joseph curls his fingers around the back of John’s head, bringing their foreheads gently together. “I love you, John. Don’t forget that. I _love_ you.” And then he is gone, wading back toward the light, water lapping softly at his legs. There’s a moment, as he watches his brother walks away, that John looks like the little boy in the book. A sweetness Fawn’s not sure she’s ever seen on his face. Eyes soft, almost pleading, and she feels the sudden urge to reach out, brush the loose strands of hair from his forehead. But she is frozen, rigid.

Joseph disappears into the darkness and John’s face hardens. His nostrils flare and then he’s on her, hand around her throat. So quick it catches her by surprises. She yelps, clawing at his hands. He shakes her, tightens his grip. “You will stop running from me. You _will_ stop fighting me.” She spits at him, but the rage inside of her vanishes when she hears the click of a gun. More than one. John chuckles, that bitter sound, as he wipes his face. He waves off his men and when he speaks against it’s that charming, measured honey that she’s heard him use a hundred times at the Spread Eagle. “Just when I think I know your sin, you show me another.” John yanks her close to him. The air hangs between them, so thick it’s hard to breathe. His lip twitches. Then he turns, pulls her along with him out of the water. Fawn stumbles on the rocks but John doesn’t stop, nearly dragging her. They’re heading away from the light, away from the truck into the trees beyond it. “You know,” he says over his shoulder, “I’ve always hated reporters.” She stumbles, he yanks. “Circling like vultures outside the courthouse. Every day. Like little animals. Scavengers.” He pulls her roughly down a side path. The darkness rises all around them, the truck’s light fading with each step. “You did the crime beat, didn’t you? Tell me, Fawn, how many jury pools do you think you tainted? How many trials by public opinion did you hold?”

Fawn blinks at his back, still struggling to keep up with him. She's stunned into speaking. “Are _you_ questioning _my_ ethics? Here? After all this?”

He stops so abruptly she slams into his back. He turns and in the darkness she can see just the lines of his face, the whites of his eyes. She feels his hand curl around her jaw. “Don’t run from me, Fawn. God has brought you here to me.” She feels the blunt ends of his nails against her skin. “I know the futility of fighting God’s plan. I know it intimately. Don’t bring more suffering than you already have.”

“Let me go.” It’s a quiet plea, one that seems to just hang in the dark. “Just let me leave. I’ll go back to New York. I won’t tell anyone. I won’t say a word about this.”

John cocks his head, eyes glittering. “How easily you forsake the people you called your friends.” Fawn swallows hard. “Now what manner of sin is that?”

“ _John._ ”

“But I know it’s a lie. Even now, bathed in the cleansing waters I can see your greedy mind work. Would this be your front page, Fawn? Your big break?” She can feel her jaw slack, mind dart. “I forgive you. I accept your sin.” He leans down, his lips pressing softly to hers. Gentle when he brings both hands to her face, to pull her closer. “I feed on it.” And then his teeth find her, his hand again at her throat. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading <3
> 
> Oh! And I have a twitter now! Come chat with me :)  
> https://twitter.com/EbabelN


	27. September, probably

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a quick reminder to really mind the tags, especially in the next couple of chapters.

She follows him through the dark. Because he seems to know the way and the night is so dense the trees have lost their shape. Even the crickets seem cowed into silence and it’s only when a livid cover of stars comes rushing above her that Fawn realizes they’ve come out from the trees onto the road. He’s not dragging her along anymore, she’s the one clinging to him, hands tight around his arm and the realization makes her recoil. Fawn staggers backward. Lights pop in her peripheries, the road hazy like summer waves of heat but the air is so chilled her fingers feel stiff. John turns, eyes almost soft and curls his fingers around her wrist. The distance between them doesn’t make sense, her equilibrium shot, like he’s closer and further away than he should be. His hand is so warm.

He leads her along the road. It’s empty and it feels, for a moment, like they are the only two people who have ever walked it, the only two who ever will. The heavy moon sits on the tops of the pines, speckled and bright and bigger than Fawn has ever seen it, ever imagined it. There’s a fire burning in a field beside them, its flames climb the air, the darkness reddened everywhere it touches. “Where are you taking me?”

John doesn’t turn but his voice booms in the quiet of the night. “Home, Fawn.”

She bristles, every hair on her body standing on end even as the warmth from his hand has started to spread gently up her body, even as the air glitters like the stars swirling above them. The breeze smells like cedar. And burning underneath that. And rot underneath that. Sugared and familiar. Fawn tugs weakly at him, John tightens his grip in her wrist. “This isn’t my home.” Her words seem to stretch across the night, slow and strange. She doubles down, tugs again at him, raises her voice. “You know nothing about me!”

John stops, staring straight ahead. She’s sure, even in the darkness, that she can see his shadow stretch out along the middle of the road. “I know you intimately.” And there’s nothing she can say to that. He’s the preacher and the Baptist and the man beside her in bed and they all know her well. And so when he tightens his grip around her wrist she curls her fingers around his. He turns. Under the starlight, she can see his face. And it’s familiar. More familiar than it should be, almost primordial, like she’s conjured him up from some deep, quiet part of herself. Like he is every nightmare and dream she’s ever had made flesh. New York feels far away, Mary May feels far away. The scratch of her woolen sheets that night more like a dream than where she is now, shrouded in smoke, still wet from the clearing. She can taste lemon at the back of her throat and, for a moment, the air smells like ocean salt, like kelp. And John’s eyes look like the sea, like the deep darkness of the water far out from the shore. And then his eyes flit over her shoulder, harden. And then the sound starts. A rattle that becomes a groan, dissolves into muttering. Fawn can feel it over her shoulder. A presence or an omen or a nightmare and John is looking right at it. His lips crease into a thin line and he doesn’t look at her when he says, “don’t look.” But she does. Turns as he brushes past her to find a man standing in the middle of the road, his shoulders hunched, bare feet caked in mud. His head is shaved, the smooth crown of it catching the light of the moon as he walks, shambles, forward. His mouth is covered, by what Fawn can’t see and when John approaches, shoes clacking on the road, the man flinches away from him, arms bent, held tightly to his sides. His eyes are rimmed so deeply in red that it’s begun to spread down the skin of his cheeks. “It’s better if you don’t look, Fawn.” But she can’t move, can’t blink. She doesn’t see the gun or the way he takes it from the waist of his jeans. She sees a brief flicker of something across the man’s eyes and then his eyes are gone, darkened, blood bursting from one side of his head. The fabric falls away to reveal the gaping maw of his mouth. Teeth cracked and yellowed, skin jagged where his lips should be, torn and scabbed. The gunshot echoes across the empty road and John stands alone. “Angels,” he says and his voice is the same as it was before, not different like she thinks it should be, after killing a man. And she can’t stop looking at him. Not at the man on the road, his blood spreading out like a stain, not at the gun still held tightly in John’s hand. But at him. The lines of his face, the shadow over his eyes. But there’s an animal inside of her that has her turning on her heel, has her running down the road. She’s screaming or she isn’t. It doesn’t matter. Her ears are ringing. She can feel him behind her, running, can feel the vibrations of the way he’s calling her name. But she’s faster. She’s always been that way. Just a little faster.

It took her all night to find Fall’s End and it was only when she’d been greeted by the barrel of a shotgun outside the church that she remembered that this is where it had all started, now back in the spider’s web. Not sharp like she used to be, not near as nimble. But it was the owner of the general store behind that gun, dark shiner on one eye, shotgun wavering in his shaky hands. Beside him, a burnt out car, still smoking. Lucky, somehow. She’s that too, in a twisted way. Lucky.

Fawn glances over at the car, distant now, a thin line of white smoke snaking toward the sun just rising now above the trees. She shifts, a cup of coffee held between her knees, the worn boards of the Spread Eagle’s front porch digging into her palms. How many times has she done this? Drank coffee out on these wooden steps? It feels like she’s been here forever, her whole life. Like she’d been born on the drive through Montana. The memories before just placeholders. Dreams. Last night would feel like a dream too if she could stop shaking. The chill from that water seeped into her bones. But the fear and longing she’d felt so palpably is muted now, small in the face of her guilt. Sitting here on Mary May’s front porch, drinking Casey’s coffee. She’d kissed John with blood on his hands, tasted the tang of it in his mouth. Fawn rubs at her eyes. All the windows of the general store across the way are blown out, shards of glass scattered across the asphalt. One of the deputies from the sheriff’s office, one she hadn’t met. Mary May told her when she’d emerged scalded and shivering from the shower. The woman had liberated the town. Fawn tries to imagine what that means, follows a dark trail of gore dried and cracking over the asphalt. She runs her fingers along the lip of her coffee mug, dips her fingers into the heat. The sensation doesn’t register. Behind her, the screen door creaks, the porch groaning under Mary May’s feet. “You ever shot a gun?”

Fawn scoffs, glancing back over at the burning car. “What do you think?”

“Time to learn.”

The field stretches on forever, gold grasses swaying softly in the breeze, speckles of wildflowers in the distance. The sky as big and blue as it was the very first day Fawn arrived here. A lifetime ago. A clear cut between then and now, before and after. Mary May has her hands over Fawns, both of their fingers pressed to the metal of the gun. Pointed outward at the middle distance. Fawn can feel Mary May’s heartbeat against her back, the steady rhythm of her breath. “Inhale.” Fawn’s chest is so tight there’s no room. “Shoot on the exhale.” The gun is hot in her hand, hotter than she expects. The smell like nothing and everything she’s ever known. In the distance, the sun hits the top of Jacob’s statue, wreathes his head in gold. Somewhere, beyond that, John is on a billboard, arms outstretched. Somewhere, beyond that, John is in the flesh. Sins carved deep in his skin, fuming. His eyes the color of glass.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whoo man this year really has been something else, huh? Like on so many levels. I’ve been going through it, especially in the past month or so, but coming on here and writing for all of you has really been such a bright spot. As always, thank you so so SO much for reading <3.


	28. Fall, probably early October

“Everything has a blueprint. You can’t make something like that without a blueprint. Or at least some sort of drawn-up map.” Fawn squints in the sun, flinches as birds call from the high tops of trees at her back. They’re on a bluff just above Fall’s End, hemmed in by dense pines, Casey’s beat to hell pickup idling beside them. Casey’s looking beat to hell these days too. Quieter than he used to be, surlier. Will sometimes now just drop a conversation, wander muttering away from the bar back into the kitchen. Mary May told Fawn one night, when the rest of the town had settled in, save for a few armed men circling the peripheries, just the two of them hushed over the bar, that he’d fought in the Gulf War. That every pop, every tremor, every thin line of smoke rising up toward the sun brings him back in inches to a place he’d left firmly behind him.

But today he looks lucid, seemed even spritely as they drove up the winding, dirt roads toward this spot. The best place, Mary May had figured when she planned it this morning over coffee, to get a good look at the sign John’s erected. The sign. Jesus fucking Christ, that sign. Fawn looks back up at it, at each letter, power cleaned so they gleam in the sun. “But I’d doubt we need it. Just some dynamite might do the trick.” She glances over at Casey. “But you’d probably know more about that than me.”

“Might not be worth our time.” Casey sniffs, sliding the wad of chew from one side of his lip to the other with his tongue. “Dumb as hell anyway. Not sure what Seed is trying to prove with that. It’s just a sign.”

But as they pile back into the truck, Fawn glances again up at it again She’s not sure it is just that. Just a sign. She drums her nails on the dash as the truck rolls back down the dirt toward the highway, the two of them jostling in their seats. She’d seen YES on the billboard, heard him chant it over and over on the radio, he’d said it to the crowd, arms outstretched, water to his hips.

But he’d never said it to her, not sure if he ever asked her to say it to him. Fawn isn’t sure if he ever asked her a question, ever asked permission for anything he did. Maybe, she thinks, in the sickest, darkest part of her, that’s why she likes him so much. Fawn rolls the window down and lights a cigarette. A new old habit. Something to do with her hands, something to keep the shaking at bay. She exhales smoke into the cold air. Beside her, Casey white-knuckles the wheel, the radio up so loud the boughs shiver as they pass, like he’s more afraid of being alone with his thoughts than catching the cult’s attention. Fawn takes another long drag. She can’t blame him, really.

Fawn is not used to this. She does not want this. She wakes up every morning with a dread that feels physical, so intense she has to take a moment to catch her breath. In the beginning – wedged in a sleeping bag at the base of the Spread Eagle’s stairs, the air humid from the breath of everyone packed so tightly together in one room – she would try to imagine herself back in New York. Back between the dense shelves of her bodega a block down the street, in the damp chill of the subway, the concrete above her like a tomb, a bunker. Laying back on her bed, fan buffeting dry air over her body, the sounds of traffic a steady rhythm through her window. The memories are hollow, paper thin and flimsy. They go nowhere. So now, when she wakes up, full of that stiff fear, she thinks of John. And it soothes her, even as the shame that whips up inside of her feels bodied, so heavy and corporeal it sometimes feels like she could take hold of it.

Maybe it’s no wonder then that Fawn has become adept at destruction. External now, not just chipping away at her own insides. Adept at cutting gaslines, watching as the darkness spills out onto the road, as the air fills so densely with the smell of it that even with the sky wide open above her just the single strike of a match might set the whole world ablaze. At scattering munitions, toppling supple crates. She still can’t shoot a gun for shit, can’t hit anything at all, but a week ago she’d set fire to a silo. Watched as the flames licked up the sides. The smoke so dark it blotted out the sun, those heavy white flowers popping like spores when they hit the heat. That night John growled over the radio and Fawn wishes, still, that she could play it back, listen to it again.

The days are chilly now, not just the nights. Fawn’s breath billows out into the air, her fingers stiff from the cold. But she can’t bring herself to come in from the cold, even as the sun sinks down below the mountains, sits stubbornly out on the Spread Eagle’s sloping front porch. Lets her fingers ache, her cheeks go numb. “Deputy’s in town.” Mary May’s quiet as a ghost now, like she’s slipped into some newer version of herself, stripped every gratuitous thing away. Her eyes, lately, seem especially blank.

“Really?”

Mary May settles down beside Fawn, her arms loose around her knees. There’s no one out now beside a few armed men at the checkpoints at either end of the road, but there’s a light on at the top of the church, the silhouette of two figures at the window. Fawn’s never met the deputy. Saw her once from a distance. A sturdy woman, her face hidden by the bill of her ball cap. “She says it’s easier for her here in the Valley than everywhere else in the county.” Mary May glances over at her. “Because John is more interested in you."

Fawn bristles, fingers twitching for a cigarette or a joint or anything _anything_ to do with her hands beside let them hang uselessly between her knees. “Well, he’s crazy, so.” But saying it feels like a betrayal and that feeling is a betrayal too. Fawn shifts, rocking her hips. “I wanna blow that thing to hell.”

Mary May frowns, then nods once. “Oh, you mean the sign.” She looks up the mountainside. Even in the darkness, even without lights, it shines. “Seems petty.”

“I’m feeling petty.” But that’s not what she’s feeling. She’s feeling like she wants to hear his voice on the radio, catch a glimpse of him through the trees. She’s feeling like a traitor and what she wants is to take every single one of those feelings and burn then down with the YES on the mountainside, an effigy to every mistake that brought her here.

The radio crackles to life when she’s alone. Driving Mary May’s truck, lights off. Following the darkened shape of the road from the Lamb of God back to Fall’s End, the sky livid with stars. A thick plume of smoke from the still smoldering ashes of where John’s sign used to be. Everything silent except for the chug of the engine. And the radio. When it crackles to life again. “Fawn.” It’s the first time he’s addressed her directly since she fled, the first time she’s heard that version of his voice that is tinged with something other than hatred, a different layer, one not necessarily better. She nearly swerves off the road, reaches for the radio, then stops, hand suspended, fingers twitching toward it like they have a mind of their own. But she recoils before she presses the button, suddenly all too aware of what that would mean. To call him, to speak with him. It would have real consequences, real fucking consequences that Fawn tries to itemize one by one in her head. John doesn’t seem to give a shit and for a moment, Fawn wonders if he somehow knows she is listening, somehow knows she is alone. “You vex me.” She slows the car, pulling off to the side of the road. The darkness simmers around her. Her breath has weight. She can hear her own heartbeat now, just barely over the cavernous silence he’s left her with. That pregnant pause, like he’s drawing her out. He is, she remembers, a lawyer. This is, she assumes, a tactic he perfected standing tall at the front of a courtroom. Fawn exhales when he speaks again. “I can usually see the sin that has most taken hold, usually right away but so many are rooted in you. Like Eve. There’s something ancient about a woman who can’t pick her vice.” Fawn picks up the radio, sets it down. She wants to scream into it, howl. She wants to beg and beg and beg. For what she’s not even sure. When he speaks again, his voice is different. Some of that honeyed charm sloughed away, just the raw malice she’d heard as he’d hovered her over the water, just before he’d pushed her under. “There are many promises in my life that I have not kept. This one I will.” This time Fawn clicks the walkie, opens her frowning mouth, but he crackles back, she lets him through. “Together we will walk through the gates and unto Eden.” She doesn’t see the headlights until they are on her, consuming the dash, until she feels the force of the impact. John’s voice comes again over the radio. A steady, even prayer. Like a chant.

She’s dazed when they bring her into the bunker and it’s only the shrinking sliver of light as the door closes, the metal scream of the door, that brings her back. By then it’s too late. By then the bunkers stale air is all around her, the hands on her unyielding. It smells like metal and grease and oil and smoke. It smells like fear. Like terror. Away from the door, the hallway slopes downward, each segment painted on the awning in trembling black script. _We love you all._ Fawn breathes it in, exhales terror, longing. She can hear him. Over the speaker, in her own head. An echo. Deep, deep inside of her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wanted to play a little bit with the game's catch and release dynamic. So expect more, you know, catching and releasing ;)  
> Thank you so much for reading <3
> 
> Oh! I lost the password to my old tumblr (as one does) so now you can find me [here](https://junkbabelna.tumblr.com/)


	29. Later, surely

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi guys, long time no talk. I hope this little slice of the apocalypse gives you a break from...your own little slice of the apocalypse lol.  
> As always, please mind the tags.  
> additional tw: implied molestation

The room buzzes. Like they’re dragging her through the insides of a dying, shivering insect. A hive. All around, a low flickering fluorescence that hurts her eyes, swarms around her head. And everything is red. Like she really is inside some corpse, its blood congealed and dripping, muscles blown open, sinews hanging limp from the curved ceiling. No, not sinews. Hooks. Like a meat locker, like a horror movie, like a butcher shop. Fawn is delirious. So delirious that it barely registers that they’re still dragging her, that her jeans are sticking on the floor, the fabric catching on something congealed to the metal beneath her. So delirious that when they lift her by the arms into a chair, she almost thanks them. 

The delirium is short lived. Fawn comes back to herself, in searing detail, when one of the men tightens a zip tie around her wrist. She tries to reach for him, finds her other wrist bound tightly to the arm of the chair. The chair rattles loudly as she moves, but Fawn doesn’t struggle long. Because just a few feet from her, close enough that she can smell a faint kick of bleach wafting of the worn wood, she sees a table. A workbench. Old, wrinkling paper stapled haphazardly to the dark, splintering wood. _No,_ Fawn thinks, curling her fingers over the arms of the chair, the bare wood sharp against her palm, _not paper._ Something worse. Some are so dried they look brittle, but others, newer, slump heavily from the staples, jagged edges curling up to reveal their wet, dark undersides. Fawn retches, the zip ties cutting at the skin of her wrists. _Skin, skin, fucking skin._ She starts to shout. Nonsense. Nothing. Just hoping the sound will wake her up, the sound will kill her, the sound will…she goes still. A glint from the corner of her eye that has her now rigid straight in the chair. There’s a cart beside her, just tall enough that it reaches the arms of her chair. It’s slick, shiny. A syringe rocks precariously on the edge; a blowtorch beside it, charred at the opening. Jumper cables. A hammer. Heavy anchor weights. She imagines herself writing this story, imagines herself putting in that line. _Investigators on the scene found various torture devices, more at home in a horror movie than in the quiet meadows of Montana._ She imagines her editor telling her to tone it down. Not believable. The whole room like blood, a smell Fawn didn’t even know before she could identify. Smells like piss too, the rank filth of unwashed human bodies. She curls in on herself, the chair groaning under her, bending to the curve of her body.

She knows it’s him before he touches her, before he says a word. She could feel him in every part of this room. All the little things she had so skillfully ignored – the dark stains on his boots, the faint scent of bleach in his truck – have become flesh here, painfully obvious. Almost a taunt. _How could you not have known?_ And worse. _Why did you choose not to see?_ But even with the floor slick dark with blood, the strips of skin curling around themselves on the workbench, she leans into his touch when he lays his hand gently on the back on her neck. Then she tenses, remembering herself, struggling again against the zip ties. “Shhh. Shh, shh, shh, shh.” His lips are in her hair, the hiss of his voice scattering across her, like he’s everywhere at once. His hands burn like a brand when he brings them to Fawn’s shoulders. “God is here.” He’s not whispering anymore, his voice booming, like dark, still shapes leaning against the wall in the room are an audience. Fawn spots a camera in the corner. _Ah._ “God is here. With us.” He tightens his grip on her, then releases, boots clacking against the metal floor. “I will guide you to his light. How lucky you are to have my steady hand.” He smells sweet, not like himself, sugared and rotten like the flowers in that field and when he circles the chair, coming into view under the low light, sparks of light pop at the corner of her eyes. “How lucky you are.” His voice is like an echo now, far away and drifting.

Fawn sags in the chair, straining to keep her head up, to look at him. He is the same as he’s always been. Tall and long. His shirt tucked loosely into his jeans; the buttons open far enough down that _sloth_ is on clear display across the hard muscles of his chest. She still doesn’t see it. Even in the thick fog of her own terror, her own confusion, she wonders why he has it. What he did so extreme that it would be carved right in the center of his chest. She hears shuffling behind her, suddenly aware that it is not just the two of them, and it breaks whatever spell he’s had over her. Fawn struggles against the ties, shifting so violently the chair begins to rock. John stills it with a decisive hand. “Enough of that,” he says, bending at the waist so their eyes are level. Fawn’s dart. From his face to the cart and back. John follows her gaze, mischief glinting across his eyes when he glances over at the cart, genuine humor that is so out of place in this room that Fawn finds herself disoriented, thoughts careening so violently around her head they blur to nothing. “Now don’t worry.” He runs a hand over the blowtorch, patting it affectionately. Fawn can feel her heart pounding at the base of her throat, wonders if he can see it, her panic, her fear. “You heard the Father. You’re special, Fawn. Not like the others. Your confession will be different.”

“John.” Her voice comes out hoarse, then loud. “John. Please. Jesus Christ. Don’t do this. Whatever this shit is, don’t do this. Please. God. _Please._ ”

He takes her jaw roughly in his hand, craning her neck to bring her closer to him. “Don’t you dare call for God now! After everything you’ve done!” His nostrils flair, the malice in his voice so bright and angry that Fawn cowers from it, instinctual. He releases her, eyes softening, like something has just dawned on him. When he speaks again, his voice is even, almost warm. Though the malice is still there, she can feel it like a rumble, an aftershock. Fawn lived through an earthquake once, laid in bed as the ground shook. Terrified to move, to breathe. She’s delirious. “I am God’s voice in this room.” He cups her cheek with his palm and she doesn’t flinch away like she should. “And he can’t hear you. He has no interest in your begging,” His lips are so close it’s almost a kiss. “But I do.”

He’s good at this. Which shouldn’t surprise her. Even if she wasn’t exhausted. Even if she wasn’t terrified. Even if the air wasn’t still wobbling like steam. He’d still be good at this. Expert courtroom form. Advancing and retreating; advancing and retreating. He must have learned that at Harvard. That’s what she’d write about. If this was her story. Fawn can almost imagine it. Sitting, legs crossed, at the back of a courtroom, recorder running in her lap, chewing the end of her pen. _The defense has an easy charisma that visibly enraptures the jurors each time he approaches the stand._ That must mean something. That he was a defense attorney. That must mean something. She wonders if their eyes would have met across the room. Wonders if he would have asked her, as the court filed out for the day, if she’d like to get a drink. She doesn’t have to wonder if she would have said yes. The zip ties dig into the skin around her wrists. Her eyes drift away from the man in front of her. Barely contained. A flurry of movement and violence and rage. There’s a camera in the corner. An antler chandelier. Shapes like bodies hanging in dark plastic from hooks. One so close she could reach out and touch it, rise and feel the heat out of it against her hand. She is sure, in the darkest part of herself, that she sees it move. That must mean something That he was the defense.

Fawn might as well be on the stand. Might as well be sitting up there, all eyes on her, heart pounding. She feels like a liar. _He_ makes her feel that way. A fervor that is rising up inside of him so clearly she can see it radiating from him. And the fervor is catching with each word that he speaks. Fawn isn’t sure if he’s threatening as much as coaxing. Coaxing as much as standing at the top of a dam as it breaks. She wants to tell him everything. Talking like a torrent, a wave. Light popping at the corners of her eyes, the air shimmering like summer heat. She tells him about her mother. About that burnt sugar smell of heroin and the stiff shag carpet between her fingers.

About the beach. The face she can’t see anymore but the sounds she can hear and the touch she can feel. Fumbling fingers between her legs when she was too young to even know what he was searching for. Promises in the sand with his hand on her neck. To be quiet, to not tell. Her eyes trained to a starfish unfurling just beyond the waves so she wouldn’t have to look. At him, at herself. To see it die, to feel herself shrivel. She tells him about the scent of forbidden citrus, late at night. Cabinets slamming just beyond the door. A poltergeist that became a man at the breakfast table, hulking and sullen. Potshots at the back of the house to keep them all in line. She tells him that she’s been running away. Toward. Forever. “Maybe I wanted them to kill me.” She says, her mouth like cotton, full of blood, “maybe I wanted that.” Fawn doesn’t know who she means. Her foster brother or father. Her mother. Those terrifying letters she got in the wake of her article, the weight of her big break. She stares at the floor. And it becomes that shag carpet, that sand, the short carpet of her office, the fan buffeting air across the hardwood of her old apartment. “Maybe I just wanted someone to make that decision for me.” When she looks up again, he is still. The fervor is gone and he looks closer to the man in the photograph than she has ever seen him. His face is soft, eyes darkened, jaw so tight his teeth must ache. And she wants him to say something, wants him to croon that smooth gospel in her ear. But he says nothing, his chest rising unevenly. She opens her mouth to call his name but finds her tongue useless, finds herself frozen. John brushes back a few strands of hair come loose across his forehead. He turns. He leaves. His footsteps echo through the room until the sound of her own pounding heart overtakes them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading <3


	30. Foggy, chilled

Fawn waits because it’s all she knows how to do. Stripped down to the basest parts of her, they all cry out for him. She is caked in her own blood, thinned out by sweat. Both zip ties have broken the skin but she is numbed out. Every sensation like an echo.

And it could be hours or it could be days by the time the last thinking remnants of herself crawl up from the depths of her dark thoughts to tell her that he is not coming back. That she should not want him to. He has abandoned her. Has pulled the darkest parts of her from her body and left her to sit alone among the shattered pieces. She hates him. Lets her hate crystallize inside herself, the slick metal walls reflecting the wet glimmer on the floor.

The zipties snap with the force of the falling chair. She rattles around like a coin, spilling onto the floor, scrambling to find purchase, the ground slick, sticky. It smears along her skin, black like oil, like tar.

Fawn’s vision wobbles, head pounds. She crawls across the floor because every inch of her hurts, aches, and because she feels safer this close to the ground. There’s a thrumming under her fingertips, a faint heat that becomes realized as she descends on her hands and knees down a set of stairs, toward a wall of twisting metal. Pipes that rattle and groan like a furnace. She’s narrow enough to fit through and thinks, wildly, as she presses her fingertips to the heat, that she could curl up in the warmth and die. Like a little mouse. But she doesn’t. She keeps moving, propelled by something inside of her that she barely recognizes.

She crawls from the pipe, finds herself crouched in a room of bunkbeds, military trunks. _We are on the brink_ painted above the door, the ends of each letter trialing down. There is a man kneeling down in front of a frame. Joseph’s glasses flash in the light, so real even if just in a picture. The man is prostrate in front of it, so wracked with emotion his shoulders heave. “Thank you,” he says, “thank you Father, for my life. For everything.” Fawn’s stomach turns, every muscle in her body clenching. She hears a scream in the distance, hears it echo across the metal, and then the scream becomes many. And then she runs. Runs so the world blurs, hands outstretched to feel as she goes. She hears voices, footsteps, her own ragged breathing, and then, all at once, it goes quiet and she is out in the sun. Fawn steps forward, halting, kicking up dirt as she makes her way across the empty expanse of earth. A truck idles in the distance, door open and dinging. There are no birds. No other sounds. The silence is crushing. Fawn opens her mouth and screams. Holds her arms out and finds herself soaked in blood. The sun makes lividly red what had before been only darkness. She falls to her hands. Lets the road rise up to meet her.

She dreams of Mary May. Of the heat of her body beside her in that cramped attic room. Of the lowlight of the bar at close, music drifting softly out the open door. Of a time that she had felt a sort of pure, simple happiness that had been so small and so quiet she could only see it now in the distance. A feeling she’d never looked hard in the eye, never let herself settle into. A curse cast in the womb, to chase that next ragged high.

When she opens her eyes the world rocks back and forth. She inhales dust, feels it under her fingernails. Her ears ring but even through the sound she can hear Mary May’s voice. A chant of her name. And John’s. The Valley. Dutch. _Answer me, answer me._ It sounds like a crackle of a radio. Static blending with the open air. There’s a sound all around her like a shout. Fawn closes her eyes, scrunches them shut. She wants to be back on the roof of the Spread Eagle, watching stars, wants to be in the passenger seat of her car, soft country playing. She wishes she never let him touch her. _Fawn Fawn Fawn._ She can hear John. Over Mary May, then under. Their voices braiding together. Louder and louder and then nothing. There’s gurgling, then a gunshot. Mary May’s voice crackles again over the radio. Her voice all static. _Coming for you._ Behind her, John. Fawn can feel his footsteps, knows him by the tempo.

Soft sounds all around her. Steam and hot water. She slips in and out of herself. Let’s the sloshing soothe the panic that rises up in her when she opens her eyes and finds her vision rimmed in white, hazy. She’s never been here before. This room. Four walls of slotted logs, the smell of cedar thick in it. A bath, a bed, a camp stove. Her heart jumps and she struggles. Like the animal part of her can smell the trap of his. She can feel his darkness. Knows it’s him and doesn’t even have to look back to see. His sins spread themselves over her thighs, each letter blurred as she tries to blink her vision steady. John’s body is hot against hers, the faint scratching of his chest hair, his beard, against her skin almost soothing.

His soft cock pressed to the small of her back, his legs out parallel to hers. What would be so quietly domestic if she were not covered in the wounds he gave her. He whispers something soft against her skin. She takes his hand to stop it moving. Her voice sounds like an echo. “Where am I?”

“Away from there.” She doesn’t know what he means but her tongue is heavy and useless in her mouth. He holds her tightly to him. The water is warm, the touch soft. She stops struggling. It feels like the easiest thing in the world. John keeps his voice low, lips skimming the shell of her ear. “I saved you.” He runs his thumbs toward the edges and Fawn’s whole body unclenches. Like he has saved her. Rescued her. “Your body and your soul” He runs the backs of the fingers of one hand along a bruise, pressing in just slightly.

She comes back to herself flinches away with a hiss. “You hurt me.”

His silence swells, the only sound the water lapping around their bodies. And then, quiet, in a voice that isn’t the Baptist or the lawyer. “I know.”

“You _tortured_ me.”

“I did.”

She feels like she is clawing toward the surface of something, pawing through an endless fog. It takes everything inside of her to hold this train of thought. “And you don’t feel guilty about it.” He reaches around to cup her face. She flinches away from him and he smooths his thumb against the skin of her cheek. “Your pain does nothing for me.” He presses his lips to the nape of her neck. “But I will bring you through Eden’s Gate if I have to drag you.” He examines her hand. “Stigmata.” He says, kissing at the grooves on her wrist the zipties left, the salt in his mouth a sharp burn. “I like you in that yellow dress.”

She feels delirious, sinking back down into the water. “What yellow dress?” “The one with the flowers, that skims the tops of your thighs.”

Fawn frowns, searching through her thoughts. Finds herself standing in that little store with the broken cup, Faith across from her with her bare, dirty feet. “You’ve never seen me in that.”

“I have. I’ve seen you in everything. I’ve seen you in everything.” His hands are soft as he skims them along her thighs. “You can wear it again in Eden. With me” 

Fawn leans back into him. She can feel his cock hardening against her back, like just the words are bringing him to life, the prophecy arousing. Fawn reaches around to cup the back of his head.. It’s easy not think about Mary May, about the people back in Fall’s End. It’s easy, when she’s with him, to not think about anything at all. She turns to kiss him, tastes blood. 

They roil in the water, twisting around each other. Grabbing and pulling. More teeth than tongue. Her nails dig in. He fucks her harder. Crawling across the floor beside the bath, leaving a long trail of themselves behind. Fawn is loud, her voice echoing. Louder than she needs to be. Loud like that she wants to drown him out, drown out all her own thoughts. He’s loud too. Animal. A growl that makes her reach back and hold onto him, dig herself in again. He cums inside her when he’s done, hands pinning her wrists to the floor. His chest to her back, the staccato rhythm of his heart against her ribs. His voice is like a hiss in her ear. “This is your shame isn’t it? How badly you want to be here. And not with them, but here with me.” Fawn notches her nails deeper, feels them break skin.

He pants over her, chin slotted where her neck meets her shoulder. “Let me keep you. It’ll be easier if you just let me.”

She runs her hand up his neck, trailing blood. “Easier than what?”

“Than when I take it.”

Fawn stiffens, coming blearily back to herself. Naked and pressed into the raw wood of the floor. “I won’t let you.”

He lifts her, pulls her backward. And she lets him, just dead weight, her peripherals still glittering, still woozy. He runs his hand down her thigh and the wet stinging takes her by surprise. With each inch he moves she can see more of it. Letters carved so deeply into her she can see the separation of the muscle. “You already have.”

She struggles against him but he’s holding tight, his arm around her waist, hand holding her jaw. “When did you do that?!”

“Now, now, Fawn. Don’t you remember?” She does, in inches. Searing pain, her breath ragged, head hung. How long had she been in that room? How long has she been here at all? The world tilts on its axis, spins forward so fast it blurs and all she can see is herself in that meadow she’d first googled back in New York, John at her back, so still time rolls by. “Let me show you the depth of your sin.”

She fights him and she doesn’t. Struggling against the grip he has on her hair, clinging to the beltloops of his jeans as he leads her into a day so lividly bright, she flinches away from it. The shock of the light settling onto ruins. Upturned cars and smoking crates. The bunker looms in the background, the shack they’d come from tucked amongst the pines along the drive up to it and Fawn’s mind drifts quietly, unhelpfully, back to the cold quiet of Dutch’s bunker, blueprints tacked up on every wall. A man lies dead a few feet from her. Nothing left of his head but his scalp, a dark clump of hair. Dark tributaries spread out over the dirt, red then black then red again as the light shifts. “Your people did this.” His voice booms. A preach and a lawyer. So loud it’s as if it’s coming from inside her own head. “To _God’s kingdom.”_ He yanks her closer to him, releases her hair to take hold of the back of her neck. “Come see what you’ve done. What _you_ ’ve done!’ The trees pat, opening up to the road. Beyond that the land slopes to valley, the mountains a distant darkness along the horizon. Plumes of black smoke rise all along the Valley, so thick the sky has reddened. “You’ve rained hell down on us.” He turns to look at her. His eyes are no color at all but the grip on her neck has softened, something almost sweet. “And for what?”

Fawn opens her mouth, but she is empty. She has nothing to say to him. Nothing at all because her thoughts have shattered inside of her. Unrecognizable.

John tightens his grip on her neck. “Do you hear that?” She doesn’t. She can’t hear anything at all, just a rushing in her ears. He turns them, back toward the bunker. There’s movement just at the edge of the road, where the gravel edges up to the dried remnants of wildflowers. A doe. Laying at the roots of a pine, the freckles spots of her fur matted down with blood, her back legs twisted.

“Sometimes.” John says, releasing her, pulling his gun from the waist of his jeans, “God’s metaphors are heavy handed.” Fawn wavers in the road. She can see nothing but him, the new blood spattered across his boots. The corners of her vision have gone all white, glittering. In the distance she can hear the roar of a truck. John turns, levels his gun toward the source of the sound. She hears a shot and a squeal and the sound of metal crunching against metal. Fawn closes her eyes. The breath she draws in tastes sweet, rotten.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading <3


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